In March 2022, forward-thinking British pop auteur Charli xcx released what was to be her “sellout” record, “Crash.” The album capped a lengthy, constricting record label contract that Charli had been trying to optimize for years, to varying success. “Crash” eschewed Charli’s typical boundary-pushing electronic sound to aim for something notably more commercial, and, ever the rebel, Charli attempted to homogenize this marketable music with visual ideas that were more to her own taste. The album cover loosely referenced David Cronenberg’s 1996 psychosexual thriller of the same name, while its music videos and album packaging toyed with Faustian pacts and selling your soul for success. The idea was that Charli would, to some degree, mold her sound into what her label always envisioned while wryly commenting on the artistic and moral sacrifices that label executives deemed necessary for commercial success. The experiment worked. “Crash” was Charli’s best-performing album to date, topping the charts internationally and debuting at number seven stateside — her first top-ten album in America after a decade of releasing music under a …