One of the first things Charli XCX revealed about Music, Fashion, Film was that it’s “about process.” In the wake of the album’s release, the pop star utilized several marketing tactics to support her framing, from “begrudgingly” releasing B-sides that scan as off-the-cuff experiments exclusively on iTunes to sharing a short film about the songs’ evolution that’s actually longer than the (original) album itself. But the more I let the songs on the BRAT follow-up sink in, the less interested I am in the circumstances of their creation; the record plants a chip in my head that tells me to make more things rather than breeding curiosity about how Charli XCX makes anything. In furthering the singer’s continuously, punishingly self-referential journey, Music, Fashion, Film captures something precious and elemental about inspiration, companionship, and laughter in the face of mortality, and you want it – and life – to stay exactly the way it is in the moment you are experiencing it: short, reverential, and unremixed, wearing your heart on its sleeve until you’re forced to let go. Until it’s gone and – if you’re lucky enough for the process to suck you back in – you’re on to the next.
1. Rock Music
Music, Fashion, Film is “about process” in the same way that it constitutes “rock music” – meaning, yeah, sure. A few days after the album arrived, A.G. Cook announced he produced shoegaze band DIIV’s next album, describing it as “the new alternative.” As far as the artifice of genre is concerned, Charli’s album could’ve credibly ridden that wave, or on the coattails of Cook’s last album cycle, Britpop. But the backwards, blocky, juvenile nature of ‘Rock Music’ is precisely what gets the engine running; it’s not interested in ushering in anything new. If I’m being honest, my first listen had me anticipating, in an ugly sort of way, the inevitable backlash; if I’m being more honest, it didn’t leave me personally divided so much as nostalgic for the teenage self that hardly even thought of stepping onto the dance floor. “Rock music,” for me and so many others, is only the beginning.
2. SS26
It doesn’t take long for the album’s elegantly mournful mood to set in; its second single is also its second track. ‘SS26’ is the one that wins you over because it speaks directly to the soul, because it portrays nihilism with beautiful colours. It’s underpinned by a melodic bassline that holds your hand through the apocalypse, but just when she can’t hide the fact that she’d rather take the easy road, her collaborators add a dirty texture to the mix. Music, Fashion, Film could have been an easy, streamlined, tossed-off project; it doesn’t sound like it.
3. Card Declined
Charli foregoes the campy pleasure that might have been embedded in a song called ‘Card Declined’, aiming instead for the dry, detuned coolness of late-career Kim Gordon (whose current collaborator Justin Raisen, though not credited on this album, worked with Charli as recently as her Wuthering Heights soundtrack). By the time she sings “Let’s go shopping,” the song’s already introduced its fractured kind of rock music, bearing little in common with a song by, say, the Strokes, who just so happened to release a new album featuring the single ‘Going Shopping’ the day Music, Fashion, Film came out. You could never imagine ‘Card Declined’ being a single – it’s too plodding, too detached, too split in personality to cut through, denying you the same pleasures that pop persona blocks off of Charli. As a less-marketable piece of the puzzle, though, it works.
4. Camera
As the final single released ahead of Music, Fashion, Film, ‘Camera’ splits the difference between the cross-disciplinary artist’s sense of insecurity and inspiration, and the result is pure magic. Compared to the gorgeous but grayscale palette that marks the album so far, Charli’s team coordinates an explosion of synths around the immortal chorus “All I know is how it makes me feel,” even as dissonant textures continue to rub off each other in the verses. Charli is candid about the embarrassment she risks diving into the less familiar industry of film, a feeling mirrored in the awkward translation of feeling to lyric, but which also recalls the earnest appetite of ‘Rock Music’. You don’t get “inspired basically all the time” without a little bit of danger, though the track’s placement suggests the scale might tip sooner rather than later.
5. 2007
I have yet to hear Charli XCX perform ‘Rock Music’ live, but Ninajirachi fantastically brought the song to life on her Primavera Sound 2026 set, and I can only imagine the Australian producer’s delight upon hearing ‘2007’, whose chorus goes: “I can take you to heaven like it’s 2007/ Pop star in my bedroom like it’s 2007-7.” Tracing a line from MySpace to TikTok, it blurs the boundary between fan and idol, as desire complicates the simple subjectivity of ‘Camera’ into “You’re the way I wanna feel.” It may not hit all the nostalgic sweet spots of a song like ‘1999’, but it’s still charming.
6. I’m Afraid
The dramatic, hollowed-out swell of ‘I’m Afraid’ reminds us the album is technically the follow-up to Wuthering Heights, which echoed off the swirling vulnerability of BRAT’s ballads. Over prickly, dissonant sonics, it’s compelling not so much in its honesty – she knows we know she’s insecure, and all the ways she damns herself strike as familiar – as its rationalization of pain, which is an “excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.” Somewhere between the naivety of ‘2007’ and the ambition of ‘Camera’, she suggests, brews an inflation of ego.
7. Yeah
The record messes with the basic tenets of rock ‘n’ roll just as Charli’s intentions become murky. All she knows is how it makes her feel, and who’s the way she wants to feel, and now that she embodies it – the pop star, the moment – does she want to? No. Yeah. Do you? You might. Slow down, stay tuned: “Now you wanna feel it.”
8. Wink Wink
Those who only recently hopped on the hype might not get the same mileage out of ‘Wink Wink’ as anyone who remembers Charli admitting she always lets the good ones go, but she swears this time: “I’m not a bad girl anymore.” It’s a sweet, clunky little song that lands much better if you’re in on the joke or have any fondness for late 2000s alt-rock, which would be a strange proposition for a single if indie sleaze revivalism wasn’t so clearly in vogue.
9. Persona
Charli XCX’s music (and fashion, and film) is all about persona, but the song doesn’t wrestle with her own so much as it confronts a friend who can’t help narrativizing their life: “Don’t fucking choke on your ego when you see me coming,” she sings. The swearing helps the line hit, but it oversells Charli’s resentment; her empathy is hard to read through the tangle of words she somehow fits over the beefy arrangement. ‘Persona’ is the kind of song that might have gotten a remix in the world of BRAT, but working it out is beyond the point here. It’s not about people saying they’re alike; it’s about the singer feeling it.
10. Magic Metal Montana
If A. G. Cook made his version of Music, Fashion, Film, it might be called Magic Metal Montana. By zeroing in on the things her longtime collaborator and friend likes – far more specific than her titular concerns – Charli not only finds comfort in their differences but a kind of escape from her own thorny ambitions. “Nothing’s gonna save us, no music, fashion, or film,” she sang earlier, but there’s hope in the way she venerates the intimate details of Cook’s life, with its “old things” and “child stuff.” When it was teased as merely Charli’s “rock album,” I was confident the record was going to sound a bit like Alaska Reid, Cook’s girlfriend, who thankfully gets a shout out here.
11. No One Last Forever [feat. David Cronenberg]
About a decade before she considered pursuing acting and took the world by storm with BRAT, Charli XCX scored her first solo hit with ‘Boom Clap’, which I remember hearing on The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack, just a few tracks removed from The Radio Dept.’s eternally dreamy ‘Strange Things Will Happen’. And in the same flicker of time, Music, Fashion, Film’s pop star confidence, its “rock music,” diffuses into the ether, far removed from any kind of identity success has strapped onto Charli. David Cronenberg’s “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” turned morbid through repetition, may cause everyone in the room to lower their heads, but catch the last line that precedes it, “assuring you that oblivion is freedom.” That self-assurance is what I hear in Music, Fashion, Film: sometimes pained, sometimes liberating, always moving forward. It may not amount to ego death, but it’s the kind of creative undoing few artists would even brace themselves for.
