Photo by Aidan Zamiri
'Music, Fashion, Film' isn’t pop, rock, sincere, or ironic. It’s all of the above.
July 28, 2026
BY Eli Enis
Everyone wants to reduce Charli xcx to one or the other. She’s either a mainstream commodity or a marquee iconoclast. A bold innovator or a savvy upcycler. A doltish narcissist with a Substack or a master manipulator playing three-dimensional chess with her bait-inducing tweets. A naive diva and her knob-twiddling producers bumbling their way through surface-level rock tropes, or a uniquely versatile pop scribe editing guitars into post-modern transmissions on fame, form, and existential purpose. With Music, Fashion, Film, Charli entertains the idea that she’s all of the above.
Her seventh full-length simultaneously toys with and toils over her competing identities—public and private, artistic and egotistic, sophisticate and celebrity—until the binaries totally collapse. Her last album, 2024’s Brat, made her a megastar, but it also brought her to “the worst place mentally that I’ve been in my life,” as she recently told Rolling Stone. Music, Fashion, Film is a raw account of the internal crises she’s faced since attaining the A-list fame that Brat openly opined might never come for her. The relatively slim, unfussy, and only sometimes fun album is steeped in the bittersweet irony of achieving one’s dreams only to unlock a new level of dissatisfaction on the other side.
Lyrically, there’s a lot to unpack with Music, Fashion, Film: honesty vs. performance, the ephemerality of art, our inevitable journey into oblivion. It’s an even more emotionally potent album than Brat, but I’m equally intrigued by how the music itself disintegrates the increasingly faint binaries between pop and rock, “guitar” and “synth” music, mainstream and marginal sounds. Both sonically and philosophically, the record mirrors the musical fluidity and psychological contradictions that are flooding the cutting-edge underground where Charli’s ties run deep. Since her 2015 linkup with producer A.G. Cook and his PC Music affiliate Sophie, Charli’s had a mutually beneficial relationship with electro-pop’s fringes; drawing inspiration from the architects of hyperpop and in turn lifting the whole epoch of music they instigated out of the SoundCloud substrata.
From her hyperpop lodestar “Vroom Vroom” to now, Charli’s whole thing has been that she’s a Top 40 veteran with taste, but she never actually wielded that much influence on the broader pop zeitgeist—that is until Brat. Two years onward, Brat’s tail continues to lengthen, serving as both the culmination of hyperpop’s half-decade of internet-native buzz and the catalyst for what followed: Slayyyter, Ninajirachi, Tiffany Day, Frost Children, 2hollis. A generation of alt-pop adventurists who are still without a proper name (“sleaze-pop” just doesn’t cut it), yet do encompass a genuine vibe shift from the early 2020s: diaristic, shamelessly sincere meta-pop that's less goofy and nerdy (100 gecs) than it is messy and aspirationally cool (The Dare).
Brat, with its fusion of throttling club classicism and tender confessionalism, greenlit (literally) those sensibilities for mass consumption. Now, for the first time in her career, Charli xcx has dropped a new album into a musical landscape that's been meaningfully altered in her own image. However, Music, Fashion, Film actively avoids all associations with those who are still bumpin’ that. Only two of the album’s 11 tracks, “Rock Music” and “2007,” evoke the playful stickiness and “hands up” inertia of Brat, and most of the others are stark, skeletal, and often gloomy. She opens the album by proclaiming “the dancefloor is dead,” but what proceeds is less about rocking out than it is about staving off rock bottom. The record is even more revealing and internally conflicted than Brat, but this time she’s doing meta pop star psychoanalysis from a place of insider power rather than outsider weakness. It’s there, higher up the food chain than she’s ever been, luxuriating in the spoils of being an A-list musician and a budding movie star, where Charli’s two identities are buckling, blurring, and driving her mad.
In “Camera,” she questions her all-encompassing devotion to being an entertainer while also acknowledging that it’s her sole source of fulfillment—“the only way to feel like I’m not actually me.” The “actual me” is becoming harder for her to access. “I’m Afraid” is partially about doubting her own ability to handle marriage, but the more alarming admission is that she believes her private pain makes her public performance feel more authentic. “Persona” begs for a friend (quite clearly her own reflection) to be honest about her internal dialogue, while “Yeah” hinges on her indecision to want or ward off approval from her fans. It’s difficult for us—and seemingly also for her—to distinguish between Charli’s actual truth and her narrative trickery, especially when “Rock Music” and “Wink Wink” make light of her own flip-flopping just to throw listeners off the scent of congruency.
My takeaway from Music, Fashion, Film is that all of these contradictions can and do coexist within a single person. They don’t negate one another, they simply add layers of nuance that aren’t neat, convenient, or logical. And I think the album’s sound expresses that confusion in a way that's effective, if not always satisfying. Although Charli’s once again working with her trusty collaborators, hyperpop pioneers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, the record is more resonant with “indietronica,” a strain of digitally constructed rock that’s buzzing in the underground. This sound is very much distinct from Brat’s “sleaze-pop” offspring: The Hellp, ear, Bassvictim, The Femcels. Electronic duos who are bands. Aughts nostalgists with the newest plugins. Artists with the look and attitude of the Meet Me in the Bathroom era, but who are doing more than just LCD Soundsystem cosplay. They didn’t need to sell their guitars to buy turntables. They never needed either to begin with when Ableton exists.
In that Rolling Stone interview, Charli declined to mention any contemporary artists she was pulling from on Music, Fashion, Film, and instead gave the classic genre-less description of the album’s digi-rock sound. She also balked at calling it a “rock record” despite declaring, “now we’re making rock music,” in the record’s juddering lead single. Unlike older Charli albums where the features and producers she selected served to curate her connection to the underground, Music, Fashion, Film’s only guest is the elderly director David Cronenberg. That decision feels like a pointed act of isolation, but her recent hang with The Femcels—the earnestly absurd “laptop twee” duo produced by Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman—confirms she’s acutely aware of this indietronica undercurrent.
The music does so as well. ”2007,” a nod to her Y2K nostalgia bellwether “1999,” situates the record right in the era that's currently all the rage to regurgitate. The song’s scratched-up and distorted vocals move with the kinetic squiggliness of exploding popcorn, reminding me of similar moments in The Hellp’s “Ssx” and Bassvictim’s “Forever Salty.” Songs that are uncannily reminiscent of the recession-era zeitgeist, yet ultimately feel grounded in the present. Other tracks on Music, Fashion, Film are more overtly modern. “Card Declined” boasts a crunchy, granular guitar juxtaposed by glitchy singing, whereas the featherweight riff in “Camera” stutters just slightly enough to let you know it’s digitally altered. The high-gain, trebley rock of “Yeah” makes the album’s abundance of Strokes comparisons impossible to deny, but the Strokes’ most beloved era marked a return to rawk traditionalism. Charli, on the other hand, is making r-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ck music that's simultaneously reverent toward and indifferent to the post-punk and garage-rock that she’s superficially mimicking.
It's less the exact sonics of today’s indietronica than it is their generational tenor—playful, form-bending, serious and silly at the same time—that I hear in Music, Fashion, Film. ear, the esoteric electronic twosome who made their first song in a library and are now inciting mosh pits at the MoMa, aren’t a “rock band,” but functionally, they are. Bassvictim are a hedonistic electro-pop act who’ve journeyed closer to misty-eyed psych-folk with each release. The Hellp are even more hostile toward binaries: the fizzy, fried pop-punk of their song “Caustic” simultaneously references the swoopy-haired neon schlock of 3OH!3 and the metropolitan cool of Justice. It’s no longer necessary to be one or the other. In fact, it’s more interesting, and indeed more honest, as Charli’s record argues, to embrace the contradictions. The only absolute, according to Cronenberg’s solemn advice in the album’s grim closer, is that “no one lasts forever.” While we’re still here, the truth is more ambiguous: dopey and deliberate, hopeful and futile, sincere and deceitful, rock and electronic. In 2026, indie bands, electronic duos, and yes, even arena-filling pop stars, can be all of the above.
Photo by Aidan Zamiri.