Album Review
Her proper follow-up to Brat is a brilliant, catchy, often very funny look at the machinery of fame
For more than a decade, Charli XCX was a secret weapon, a brazen experimentalist, a raw diarist, and (apologies to Chappell Roan) your favorite artist’s favorite artist. But she was not, exactly, a pop star — the kind that fills arenas,covers magazines,performs at the Grammys, and has the masses hanging on her every word. The British musician’s culture-shifting 2024 electro-pop confessionalBrat changed all that, lifting her name from “also starring” to above the title. Who better to churn out a 30-minute treatise on the art of image-making?
Charli is well on her way to mastering all three mediums spelled out in the title of her new LP, Music, Fashion, Film. But the story of her seventh studio album has been its seeming swerve, as announced by its first single, “Rock Music.” The track — with its croaking guitar, cymbal smashes, and stuttering vocals — sounds nothing like Brat’s gleaming, clubby gems (or the bouncy pop-punk of her 2014 LP Sucker, for that matter). But it doesn’t define an aesthetic as much as an ethos: hanging around and making stuff with your friends. As another hitmaking iconoclast once said, it’s still rock & roll to me.
