It's a crossroads that feels less like Brat's Bonnie Raitt Nick of Time lineage and more like something Charli had to choose, consciously, deliberately. Raitt’s story of fragility hovered over Brat, especially in the Bon Iver remix of “I think about it all the time,” where Raitt’s sampled voice is a ghostly mentor whispering about time slipping away before you’ve done the thing. Music, Fashion, Film metabolises the sentiment and becomes a new sort of offer to Charli: No longer does she have to prove herself to the industry as she seemed to have done with her last two albums; perhaps even more difficult here, she’s proving herself to herself.A.G. Cook’s guitar work threads through the album with an off‑the‑cuff immediacy recalling Blur’s 1997 hit “Song 2,” a track indifferent to polish and meaning. Charli thrives in that space – tossed off yet intentional, sincerity and irony collapsing into each other. The Strokes and Blur are obvious references (she practically admitted it with that “no but I love the strokes” caption) as is her sophomore album, Sucker; yet it’s more than a return to Sucker’s Tumblr-girl pop-rock DNA, even though Sucker remains the blueprint for a lot of the 2020s pop-rock/punk revival. Cook explodes familiar textures of guitars, bass, drums into something glitchy and synthetic, unmistakably Charli. The volatile, crunchy guitars work because they don’t dress Charli in a genre costume; they feel absorbed into her existing aesthetic, as if her brat attitude has been poured into a grungy, garage-rock mold and left to ferment.
Her art dips into legacies without being beholden to them, rejecting references as soon as she invokes them, creating a playful contradiction that feels like her own post‑postmodern language. The contradictions come into focus immediately on opener “Rock Music,” which filters headbanging physicality through Charli’s glitchy universe. “I’m really bangin’ my head / I’m really hurting my neck” Charli sings in her typical blasé, bored tone, a thought that is both literal and metaphorical – impact as sensation, sensation as meaning, meaning as reckless honesty.
If Brat was expansive because it mutated in public – remixes, sibling tracks, the thrill of hearing “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” for the first time, a doppelganger that refracts the original – Music, Fashion, Film expands through reference, homage, collaboration, persona. “Card Declined” achieves more in its suite‑like structure than most artists manage in an entire album cycle; it’s her “Judy Blue Eyes” moment filtered through TikTok aspiration, luxury aesthetics, and the collapse of the future a generation was promised. And the final section being a b‑side of “Rock Music” deepens the recursive architecture that defines her work.
And that’s what makes a song like “Camera” feel so central. It catches Charli in a moment of confrontation, the same way Brat's “I think about it all the time” did, but the recursive vulnerability is stranger here. On the surface, it’s vanity – “I know how it makes me feel when the camera’s on” – but beneath that is a confession about performance, embodiment, and the parts of the self that only appear under artificial conditions. She’s humbled by film and acting, intimidated but excited, accessing feelings she can’t reach otherwise. “I can be anything I want to be,” she sings, and “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck.” It’s a thesis for the era: the willingness to be a beginner again, to suck a little, to let the camera expose rather than soften, but ultimately using the camera to escape her persona as Charli xcx.
Music, Fashion, Film pays homage to the way some of the best art in history has been created: through true collaboration and friendship, through scenes and schools and kitchens full of people making things together: Andy Warhol’s Factory, the New York School, the Beats. So while Charli continues to thrive on self-referentiality, she is never closed off or purely ironic. Rather, she is intensely collaborative, building from the energy of people creating around each other and being inspired by one another. You put on a Charli xcx record and you can hear the time in the studio as a sort of party itself.
The cover makes that argument visually: John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese in a stark black‑and‑white kitchen – an image collapsing avant‑garde art, high fashion, classic film, and crunchy guitar music into one room. Charli isn’t pictured, but she’s everywhere, the unseen host threading these monumental men together, turning their histories into ingredients for her own volatile recipe. The kitchen metaphor works because it’s a site of collision, appetite, mess, transformation. Not too many cooks – just the right ones. And Charli, stirring the pot, letting the references burn a little, letting the flavors clash. Art as food, food as art, sustenance as persona. If anything’s missing, maybe it’s Anthony Bourdain – but maybe that’s the point: she’s building her own lineage, one that doesn’t need any permission from the old guard.
“SS26” pushes the project’s nihilism to the surface, imagining a runway that goes “straight to hell,” where “nothing’s gonna save us / not music, fashion, or film.” It’s bleak, but Charli’s bleakness is always threaded with humor, with confession, with the absurdity of being a public figure in a world that demands constant apology. “I was hacked / it got taken out of context, obviously,” she sings, and the “notes app apology” line lands like a wink at the entire ecosystem of celebrity damage control. Here, she becomes an apologist for her album that was leaked (the unreleased XCX World), and she wants us to remember that she still doesn’t care. Or maybe she does.
“I’m Afraid” is the album’s darkest interior, and maybe its most delicate. The acoustic guitar feels startling in Charli’s world precisely because it’s such a rare sound in her catalogue, and also because it precedes the brutal honesty that follows: “I’m a wife / I’m a kid / I’m destroyed / I’m a bitch,” she sings, compressing identity into roles and accusations, all unstable, all at war. “All this pain makes me believe / I’m a better artist now / an excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.” It’s one of the sharpest statements she’s ever made about the mythology of suffering as artistic fuel. The song feels like the come-down after the party, the numbness after the drugs wear off, the same atmosphere that floats on “Twice” on Crash. Except here, the stakes feel higher, more adult, more frightening.
