What Happens When a Pop Star Wants to Hide?

Hattie Lindert considers Charli xcx's Music, Fashion, Film.

Art by DJ Short

The new Charli xcx album closes with an address from David Cronenberg, who slowly enunciates what it’s like to almost die. “As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” he explains. “I thought about people. I thought about life.” On Music, Fashion, Film, the people make far more than the place. Charli has plenty of qualms about the industries surrounding the three disciplines that, as she told Apple Music, are “what my life is about.” But she chooses to represent them with living avatars: John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese, gathered in a kitchen so spare that it only has an ashtray. It’s not exactly idolatry, and it’s not exactly partnership. It’s more like proof of life.

Never before has Charli meant so much to so many people. The long tail of Brat Summer left her with lofty expectations and greener, stricter fans who’d prefer an endless train of “girl, so confusing” stunt casts to any real artistic growth. It’s fair to call the unwieldy and lo-fi Music, Fashion, Film a stan purge. But what she’s really doing is circling the wagons. For all the introspective spirals and “I” statements on the new album, Charli’s core cohort—namely her producers, A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, her director, Aidan Zamiri, and her husband, George—are rendered with uncharacteristic detail. (“Magic Metal Montana,” the first song she’s ever dedicated to Cook in 15 years of collaboration, is awkward and abundantly sweet.) On an album she has said is “about process,” it’s the friends along the way who star.

It’s a sound storyboarding call, given that Charli has more complicated feelings about the spotlight than ever before. If 2022’s ill-fated Crash was her committing to the pop star bit, Music, Fashion, Film is her squaring with actually being one: worrying about the rollout, thinking about the brand, wondering (on “Camera”) “Do I even wanna make music?” On the spare and uneasy highlight “SS26,” she deadpans about the futility of being famous when the world is going “straight to hell.” Over a metronome snare and a plucky indietronica loop that crumbles into electric guitar churn, she’s numb enough to embrace the distractions: “Can’t hide the fact I’d rather takе the easy road/I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes.”

Charli may sound like she’s at arms length, but it’s a trick of the shadows. Her clipped, deadpan delivery and fatalist lyrics doesn’t land as pessimist so much as pragmatist. The world will end and everyone you know will die, so let’s have fun making what we want now. Earworm palette cleansers “2007” and “Yeah” feel designed to delight even a brat purist, but who’s counting? The hands-in-the-air shrug of Music, Fashion, Film is its most effective fakeout: the delivery and riffs are blasé, but the content reveals an artist who cares a lot, about the right things and the wrong things and the largely inconsequential things.

This makes Music, Fashion, Film scan as even more intimate than her stroke of quarantine brilliance how i’m feeling now, perhaps because it deftly captures repetition and spontaneity in one fell swoop. You can hear her, Cooke, and Keane messing around methodically, tinkering with reverb petals, chopping up Notes App sketches, ping-ponging melodies and harmonies against one another. It’s a little Is This It, dab The Bends behind each ear, spray on The Joshua Tree to keep everything in place. Mostly, it’s as if the Paris studio where they recorded was just someone’s basement and the stakes were no higher than inducing headbanging.

This lightly juvenile feel is a boon for the album’s production, but can come off cloying when the ethos bleeds into the lyrics. The peak of “SS26” is sequenced just before the nadir of “Card Declined,” a muddled commentary on, I guess, capitalism and identity that sounds suspiciously like a lost slam poem from a teenage beatnik’s archive. (“I’ll buy a personality…. card declined.”) It’s too heavy-handed to match the rest of the record, which remains fleet-footed even in its more defeatist moments. Hey, if you’re gonna be apathetic, might as well do it with your whole (or none of?) chest.

Like the Cronenberg which repeats on a swivel to close out the record (“They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever”), Charli’s at her best when she’s resigned to reality. It sounds pessimistic, but it comes off pretty radical—when everything eventually becomes whatever, you can do whatever you want. Paramount to Music, Fashion, Film’s success is that, despite the disillusionment and detachment baked into the concept, Charli’s still clear on her style, her substance, and her very human North Stars. She may be fucking around and figuring it out, but at least she’s pointing her arrow somewhere. What’s more optimistic than that?