Earlier this year, I wrote an article with the headline “Slow Down, Charli XCX.” The pop singer had followed a hit album, 2024’s Brat, with a steady pulse of output—a remix album, a soundtrack album, a host of movie roles, plus many, many marketing stunts—that had me exhausted by someone whom I consider to be one of the most exciting voices in music. Quantity was beating quality; good enough was smushing great.
Five months later, a new Charli XCX album has arrived, with all of the memes and metacommentary that tend to swirl around music’s most online star. It’s called Music, Fashion, Film, and it was conceived in what she’s described as a burst of inspiration during last fall’s Paris Fashion Week. With a spiky and Scotch-taped sound, the album is a 30-minute broadside against overthinking the artistic process. In direct challenge to those who feel she’s saturated the market (I’m not the only one), she’s rallying for an idea that feels very now but really is also very old: More is more.
Love songs to the muse abound. “Yeah, we’re so inspired / basically all the time,” she sings on the opener, titled “Rock Music,” whose glitch-kissed analog instrumentation and lyrical logorrhea announce the album’s sound and attitude. “Camera” celebrates the sheer terror of acting by comparing the director’s lens to a gun; “Magic Metal Montana” narrates recording-studio-forged friendship while cutesy New Wave riffs percolate. The album closes with a monologue from the director David Cronenberg, who preaches that long-term legacy really can’t be the artist’s concern. His implication is that what matters is what you do in this lifetime—so get to doing it.
Charli is known for making self-aware, cybernetic dance pop—the art-school take on Britney Spears—but this album most flagrantly calls back to a rock band: the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed modeled the sort of petulant sing-talking that characterizes her verses. The album’s producers, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, have made a digital drag-and-drop collage of the Velvets’ ingredients: tinny guitars evoking 1970’s radio-rock foray, Loaded; metronomic beats in the lineage of the band’s sparse and steady timekeeper, Moe Tucker. Sitting next to Martin Scorsese and the designer Marc Jacobs on the album cover is the group’s multi-instrumentalist John Cale, rock’s god of noisy, dignified experimentation.
Comparisons to the Velvet Underground recontextualize Charli’s career in a useful way. By courting the charts while pulling from the avant-garde, she’s long been at the center of the tiresome debate over “poptimism,” an alleged cultural turn toward valuing easy gratification over difficulty in art. But the Velvets were sneering at the false dichotomy between those things back in the ’60s. Yes, Cale droned with dread, and Reed sang of scandalous topics (I wish Charli and other leading songwriters of her generation held his social-documentarian instincts—rather than fixating on the person in the mirror). But Reed was also a bubblegum fan who sought hits. He shared the ambition Charli sings about on the sterling Music, Fashion, Film B-side “Playboy Bunny”: to make a song as memorable as the canonical smut mag’s logo.
A few tracks here might indeed rate as future classics. With serene guitars and unnervingly beautiful vocals referencing the malaise of doomscrolling, “SS26” glides from the speakers like some chiffon-clad horseman of the apocalypse (“Spring, summer ’26 / When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it”). The sludgy, distorted “Card Declined” well captures the existential futility of a shopping binge. “Yeah” is a brilliantly simple distillation of the creative process in which Charli mumbles “I don’t wanna” a bunch—until she changes her mind. Surf-rock riffs, punctuated with pockets of silence, eventually slacken in tempo for a glorious, slo-mo finish. The track has a complete thesis about the ups and downs of art making, articulated almost entirely in sound.
Generally, the more words in a song here, the worse it is. Charli’s aiming for sprezzatura, but of course that’s not something you can aim for—and many of the results feel like careless rambling. On the otherwise-delightful, fuzzed-out “Wink Wink,” a line in the first verse is as unpleasant as grisly steak: “And maybe I fucked your dad / Just kidding, I’m only saying that for effect.” Meanwhile, the sweetly nostalgic “2007” is slightly undercooked: “All from your apartment, you can shine bright like”—and here the brain craves some twist—“a star.” The most personal tracks on the album are convoluted yet bland, like the recounting of uninteresting dreams. “Magic Metal Montana” salutes her producer Cook, but her descriptions are superficial—as if Charli doesn’t really know him.
With their unusual production style and intriguing subject matter, many of these songs point to far better versions of themselves. Is it churlish to ask for more oomph, more insight, more effort? The album’s cover seems to answer that question by featuring three masters of modern media who are known for being prolific. Jacobs used to put out 16 fashion lines a year. Scorsese’s all-over-the-place 1980s output was criticized as inconsistent at the time, but fans have come to appreciate The King of Comedy and After Hours. Cale will always be thought of as a genius even if few listened to, say, 2024’s Poptical Illusion. These men create simply because creating is what they do—and audiences have been lucky that’s so.
Charli has every right to take heed from that model. But the artists she’s channeling are icons of a 20th-century paradigm now destroyed by overproduction. After the internet made creation, distribution, and consumption of media into frictionless affairs, pop culture seemed to become swamped: so much content, so few classics. Cronenberg is right that artists need not create with posterity in mind, but for a contemporary oracle such as Charli, the concerns of the present do merit consideration. And the great concern, right now, is too much mediocrity.