Charli XCX returns after the cultural phenomenon of Brat with Music, Fashion, Film, an album that abandons the dimension of the generational manifesto to explore new forms of sonic identity.
There are Taylor, Olivia, Sabrina, Ariana, Gracie. And then there is another championship, an elsewhere where the charts stop being a compass and pop is deformed, reconstructed, pushed beyond its boundaries. Here's Charli xcx.
“Music, Fashion, Film” is the confirmation of an attitude now rare in contemporary pop. Charli doesn't explore the margins to bring them to the mainstream, she uses them to contaminate the surface of the song, contaminating the surface with indie impulses, visceral edges and an almost curatorial sensibility. Charli doesn't use pop to reassure, she uses it as unstable material to deform, sabotage, reconstruct.
After the cultural earthquake of “Brat“, the 2024 album that transformed an apparently chaotic aesthetic into a generational manifesto, changing course was almost mandatory. But it was also a risk. Losing the newly acquired audience, rejecting the winning formula, choosing a less predictable path meant exposing oneself to the judgment of those who were simply waiting for a new version of “Brat”.
Critics were divided. The choice to escape the logic of replication did not convince everyone. The Telegraph gave the album a two out of five star rating, claiming that “the Brat star's attempt to reinvent himself artistically is stifled by jarring production and empty, self-congratulatory songs.” A diametrically opposite reading comes from the Guardian, which with a score full of five stars out of five identifies the core of the work precisely in the transformation: “Charli turns the idea on its head: how, at any moment, a bolt from the blue can upset your idea of yourself, making you feel terrifyingly reborn.”
The seemingly prosaic title, “Music, Fashion, Film”, recounts the new trajectory of the British artist, increasingly immersed in cinema, fashion and the construction of a public image. But from the first extracts the picture appeared more elusive than the emotional and generational analysis of female relationships that “Brat” had gone through. Here Charli seems less interested in photographing the chaos and more intent on questioning what remains after the explosion.
Even the iconography follows this drift. The cover, a black and white photograph that brings together John Cale of the Velvet Underground, the stylist Marc Jacobs and the director Martin Scorsese, seems to declare a cultural genealogy rather than a simple aesthetic reference. Charli isn't looking for a place in the history of pop: she seems to want to dialogue with those who have already tried to demolish its conventions.
Always a lucid observer of cultural mechanisms, Charli understands that self-commodification is no longer an accident of the system, but the system itself. Showing yourself, selling an image, transforming your identity into a product: this is the contemporary condition. The question becomes whether this permanent exposure could be a form of liberation or just a more elegant way to fuel the fire.
Even the choice of guitars and the abandonment of the omnipresent Auto-Tune become part of the reflection on authenticity. It is not an organic conversion to rock, nor a nostalgic disguise: it is another device to undermine what we consider true and what is instead just a construction.
Barely half an hour of dry, dark, nervous music, which refuses to chase the perfect hit. Charli doesn't try to replicate the once-in-a-lifetime moment that established her. A direction that can already be understood in “Wuthering Heights”, even if the context there was the more protected one of a soundtrack. Here, however, he chooses to dismantle his own myth before it becomes a cage.
“Music, Fashion, Film” is a restless, ambiguous, at times repelling record. Precisely for this reason, a necessary disc.
SCORE: 7.50
THE VOTES OF OTHERS
DIY Magazine – Rating 10.00
The Guardian – Rating 10.00
Pitchfork – Rating 8.20
Rolling Stone – Rating 8.00
The Independent (UK) – Rating 6.00
The Telegraph (UK) – Rating 4.00
TO LISTEN NOW
Rock Music – Camera – I'm Afraid
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Eleven songs for half an hour. Straight no frills. Must listen!
