Charli XCX was in the middle of a meltdown. Her husband was hugging her. She was bawling. Then the phone rang. It was John Cale. She’d been hoping the Welsh musician might record with her. She heard his deep, gravelly tones. “I was like, oh my God, it’s John Cale calling me mid-breakdown,” she told Bella Freud on a recent Fashion Neurosis podcast.From “mid-ugly crying”, Charli flipped into speaking about the song she wanted to record with him. “He was open to it,” she said. And so their partnership began for the haunting opening track on Charli’s companion album to Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s glossy movie starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie.That the artistic partnership formed in the midst of personal chaos was very on-brand Charli. For most of her career, the English singer has made it clear she’s a pop star like few others, willing to put her foot on the gas even when she’s already miles out in front or vulnerable.This weekend heralds her return with a seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, which arrives as most artists would have been taking a well-earned break and counting their Spotify streams – billions of them, in Charli’s case.Brat, her 2024 album, was an epoch-making success, a record that hurtled like a juggernaut into the charts, burst through the boundaries of culture and landed splat in the real world. Brat wielded an energy (punk, girlie, strong, agonising, jealous, vulnerable, complex, sexy), a colour (lime green), a season (Brat summer), a dance (the Apple dance) and a politics (Kamala Harris piggybacked on Brat’s ethos for her presidential campaign that year). In Dublin and Cork, Brat summer parties were organised where lime-green-wearing attendees streamed through doors to hear Charli on the speakers. Brat was Charli’s sixth album, but many mistook it for her first. Charlotte Aitchison started making music in Essex as a 14-year-old only child of mixed heritage, Indian and Scottish, who loved the Spice Girls and whose parents brought her to play at raves. She started art school at 18, relocating to London, but dropped out in her second year. Her debut album, True Romance, came out in 2013, and for a while her career bunny-hopped along in fits and starts.No one knew how to categorise her, perhaps not even Charli herself.Charli XCX on stage in London in 2011. Photograph: Marc Broussely/Redferns When I went to see her at Electric Picnic in 2019, her audience seemed to be largely dads with their young daughters, who had dragged their parents along because of her song Boom Clap appearing in the 2014 film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars. It was as good a reason as any to see a gig that was a highlight of the weekend.Charli XCX already had hits: Fancy, with Iggy Azalea; I Love It, which she gifted to Icona Pop; and 1999. But she was starting to gain stage presence and a kind of musical USP. On stage, violent-looking in a black two-piece under gauzy chiffon and big boots, she wrung emotion from her AutoTuned vocals, bringing a rare, remarkable plaintive quality to the sometimes robotised sound.By 2024, when Brat emerged, what was nascent had become undeniable. She’d spent years toiling as a minor league pop star. On Brat, she broke the fourth wall by talking about what that felt like. On Sympathy Is a Knife – a song thought to be about Taylor Swift, who was then dating The 1975 lead singer Matty Healy, himself a bandmate to Charli’s husband, George Daniel – she sang about how she struggled with the way “this one girl taps my insecurities” and she didn’t “wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show”. The chorus ran: “I couldn’t be her if I tried. I’m opposite, I’m on the other side.”On Girl, So Confusing, Charli sang about her ambiguous friendship with New Zealand pop artist Lorde: “Can’t tell if you wanna see me falling over and failing.” The remix, which featured Lorde adding a response, was mesmerising because it felt so candid. The song was both a bop and a problem page. Can two women be allowed to succeed at the same time in a patriarchy?[ Lorde on weight loss and body image: ‘It’s this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women’Opens in new window ]Brat felt like an honest and prickly account of womanhood, a stiletto with the heel held in Charli’s hand and pointed outwards, sometimes a weapon, sometimes an impediment, sometimes just a party shoe to look cute in and command attention.Out of her rave origins, Charli had become the mainstream artist that messy girls needed. The ones inking on black eyeliner in the club bathroom at 3am and wondering how to get into full-time adulting while still, as Charli’s pal Emily Ratajkowski observed to Rolling Stone, “doing coke and dancing on tables”. Charli XCX at Glastonbury in 2025. Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage The gigs became arena tours. She won an Ivor Novello award for songwriter of the year in 2025. She drew more fans at Glastonbury than Neil Young did headlining the main stage, much to the confusion of some who couldn’t figure out what a girl in skimpy clothing using AutoTune was doing to magnetise fans. Conan O’Brien offered a classic dad note when he told her on a podcast that he couldn’t relate to her but that his daughter loved her. A remix album of Brat appeared, with Julian Casablancas, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande adding vocals. It was a rare case of some of the remixed tracks being better than the originals.Last summer, when she appeared in Dublin, at Malahide Castle, she was visibly exhausted – still impressive but limping across the Brat finish line. Vision board complete. Job done. She’d hit every target on the pop pinball machine. Time to rest. Time to marry Daniel, which she did, at Hackney Town Hall, London, in July. Time to maybe think again about having those babies she’d sung about contemplating on Brat: offering “a different life, new purpose”. Or not and just live her life.Whatever it would be, “I was not thinking I would be making a record,” Charli told the Pop podcast. “After Brat and Wuthering Heights, I felt I would not make music for a minute, that I would have a creative pause. Midway through Wuthering Heights I thought: ‘I wonder what I have to say that’s left within me.’“Then, one day, inspiration struck. It took me by surprise, but I had to go with it.”As AG Cook, her collaborator and producer since 2015, said: “I can be a workaholic, but Charli’s outclassed me on every level.”Made in a tight time frame around the inspiration afforded by Paris Fashion Week, the record thematically dips into the loves of Charli’s life: music, fashion and film. She has collaborated again with Cook and Finn Keane, saying she works well within the audio boundaries they create.“We’re never thinking about the music in isolation,” she told the Pop pod. “We’re thinking about all of these other things that build a language of a world. That has always been rewarding to me.”For its lead single, Rock Music, Charli delivered a kiss-off to the cliches of rock music. It was funny, acerbic (“We’re making raaaawk music,” she sang, “We’re really banging our heads”) and neatly undermining of itself: flirting with guitar, the song nonetheless sits on a bed of electronica.Elsewhere, she offers a scabrous view of the Instagram landscape that CMAT has also fired shots at. “Think my politics could work as a press strategy / And my heritage could give me quite the USP / Can’t hide the fact I’d rather take the easy road. Yeah, I think I’ll be all right if I look good in the clothes.”Music, Fashion, Film: John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese on the album cover. Photograph: Aidan Zamiri The album cover for Music, Fashion, Film lit up the internet: Cale, the designer Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese sitting in, as Cale put it, “someone’s kitchen”, staring blankly at the camera. You’re left to consider their Mount Rushmore heritage, their cultural dominance and the invisible puppet master pulling the strings: Charli XCX herself. They are in place because Charli XCX willed it. It might be a tribute. It’s definitely a flex. It’s a position of control that Madonna must be kicking herself that she hadn’t thought of.The cover was shot by Aidan Zamiri, who also directed Charli XCX in the mockumentary The Moment, a semi-fictional look at the effect of Brat. He also delivered the video for her latest single, Camera, in which the French actor Vincent Cassel erupts on screen, delivering take after take for an action movie as Charli sits on the camera dolly, coolly observing from a distance. Another auteur, David Cronenberg, also features on the closing track of the new album.The emphasis on film possibly flags a new long-term direction. Charli has spent the past couple of years on a learning curve, soaking up parts in movies, including Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero and Pete Ohs’s Erupcja. If the idea of being someone else is appealing to her, it’s a theme several of the new songs seem to reinforce.There are points where, beneath the warm washes of guitars and the electronica, you get a sense of an artist who is terrified of stopping work, because of what she might find in the silence of the four walls around her. Making music and art is a release, an escape valve from herself. “I’m always fighting between feeling unbelievably stable and unbelievably out of balance,” she has said. “Engaging in making things brings me so much joy. I do what I do to fight off my depression and stay alive.”Music, Fashion, Film is released by Atlantic Records on Friday, July 24th