Charli XCX on New Album, ‘Rock Music,’ and Not Making ‘Brat’ Again

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harli xcx believes in ghosts, which is why she tends to keep a safe distance from wherever they might gather. That might be difficult on this mid-May afternoon, considering we’re standing on the grassy 54 acres that make up Hollywood Forever cemetery, where Charli has suggested we film this interview. Roughly 95,000 souls rest here, including those belonging to Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille, and Dee Dee Ramone, but Charli isn’t about to grab a Ouija board. In fact, the 33-year-old pop star suspects it might be too late. “We’re probably possessed now,” she says in her languid British accent, gazing through her signature black wraparound sunglasses.

We’re in an area of Hollywood Forever known as the Garden of Legends, which overlooks a serene lake decorated with weeping willows, palm trees, and towering mausoleums. She’s wearing a custom all-denim Levi’s set of low-waisted jeans and a frayed zip-up jacket. The skies are gloomy and overcast, fitting for a trip among the tombstones. (Strictly speaking, Charli doesn’t need the shades.)

This is Charli’s first time walking among the graves, but she first visited the property — which regularly hosts screenings, concerts, and even yoga classes — back in 2021, when she performed at the site’s Masonic Lodge while on tour for her pandemic-era cult classic, How I’m Feeling Now. Death surrounds us, but there are signs of life, too: Peacocks roam the grounds, fanning their feathers next to the cemetery’s 1962 Rolls-Royce hearse, while turtles, ducks, and feral cats go about their day. “This gang over here,” Charli says, pointing to a pack of ducks waltzing across the lawn. “I love the sound they make. So cute!” 

Four days earlier, Charli released “Rock Music,” the first taste of her upcoming album, Music, Fashion, Film, out July 24. The song was a remarkable left turn from her 2024 dance-pop masterpiece, Brat — a sharp yank of the steering wheel that gave the internet a brutal case of whiplash, as Charli declared, “The dance floor is dead.” She sang in fragmented Auto-Tune across distorted electric guitar, but the message was clear: “Now we’re making rockkkkkkkkkkk music.”

The response to “Rock Music” was loud, and mixed. Some fans loved the curveball; others were convinced Charli was poking fun at classic-rock tropes (she sings about jumping off the stage, and throws a TV out the window in the music video). “Very funny prank, Charli,” posted one fan. “Now where is the actual lead single?” Courtney Love admiringly called her a troll; Madonna subtly captioned a photo “If your dance floor feels dead/Maybe you’re playing the wrong music.” (More on that dance-floor line, and the whole “rock” thing, in a moment.) 

Watch the video interview below

The song’s provocative nature — and the fact it’s an intentional departure from Brat — is a move straight out of the xcx playbook. “All of my albums work in opposites,” Charli says. “They repel against each other, and that’s the connective tissue.” She could have made Brat 2, but to do so would be painfully boring — and so very not Brat. “I knew when I was making it that I was never going to make that record again,” she says. “It’s not creatively rewarding for me to make the same thing twice.”

Charli has been making music since she was in her early teens, co-writing (and appearing on) the 2012 Icona Pop hit “I Love It” and her own “Boom Clap,” before she went on to release thrilling hyperpop gems like “Vroom Vroom” and “ILY2.” But it took years for a mainstream audience to catch up with her. “I used to never think about Billboard/But now I’ve started thinkin’ again/Wonderin’ ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial ­success,” she sang on the hypnotic Brat cut “Rewind.” And sure enough, that’s exactly what she got.

Brat dominated the charts and critics’ year-end lists, but more than that, it made her a cultural phenomenon. It infiltrated seasons (Brat Summer), dictionaries (Collins named “brat” the word of the year), and even politics (Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign). The electric lime green of the album art seeped into fashion and meme culture, while the definition of “brat” no longer meant whiny children begging for ice cream, but confident, unapologetic adults whose flaws only made them more beautiful and chic. “I loved how she built that persona out,” says Charli’s friend Emily Ratajkowski. “It’s a woman who’s contemplating motherhood while still doing coke and dancing on tables. It’s genius.” 

Brat inspired SNL skits, before Charli worked double duty as the show’s host and musical guest. She also headlined an arena tour and released the superb remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, which featured collaborations with artists like Billie Eilish and Lorde. And, yeah, eight Grammy nominations (and three wins) followed.

Charli capped the Brat revolution with The Moment, a 2026 mockumentary on the era that’s just one of the many credits in her burgeoning filmography, alongside upcoming projects like Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist and a currently untitled film with Japanese horror director Takashi Miike. And earlier this year, she released the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s sensual period drama starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. 

She can’t imagine taking significant time away from her work. “I don’t fucking have hobbies,” she says. “This is my life. It’s every single fiber of my being.” Or, as her collaborator and producer A. G. Cook puts it, “I can be a workaholic. But Charli’s outclassed me on every level.” 

“The unexpectedness of the next album, and taking it in a completely different direction, just speaks to how much she’s not ­worried about remaining popular,” Ratajkowski says. “She’s worried about staying interesting.”

Charli would probably put it a different way. “I don’t really feel the need to explain my intentions behind anything I do,” Charli tells me. “But I’ll just say I find that things can be earnest and funny at the same time, and they don’t have to exclusively live separately. That’s how I feel about a lot of my work, and if people interpret that as trolling, then that’s fine.” 

And yet, despite her seeming no-fucks-given persona, Charli does, in fact, give some fucks. Over several hours with me in New York and L.A., she’ll be vulnerable, spicy, teary-eyed, and damn funny. She’ll go deep on her mental health, and the internal battle over how much she does — and does not — actually care about public perception. “The discourse is loud, and sometimes that can be very overwhelming,” she says. 

 “Things can be earnest
and funny at the same
time. They don’t have
to exclusively live separately.”

This is also why, she  says, she’s over doing press. “This is probably going to be my last long-form interview with a journalist for a minute,” she tells me at one point. “You got in there right at the end.”

THE 1973 GOTHIC THRILLER The Iron Rose is on Charli’s mind. Directed by Jean Rollin, the film centers on a first date that goes horribly wrong after the couple get lost in a sprawling cemetery. It’s dreamlike and lovely (except for a creepy scene involving a clown), with a vivid Seventies color ­palette and a pace that quietly builds tension. “There’s something quite romantic and strange when you come to a cemetery,” she says. “It’s like stepping into another dimension.” 

Walking through the cemetery’s Garden of Legends, we pass graves that Charli had on her must-see list: Janet Gaynor, the silent film star who was the first woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress; Jayne Mansfield, who is actually buried in Pennsylvania but has a headstone here anyway; and cult filmmaker David Lynch, who died last year. As we walk by Lynch’s epitaph — “Night blooming jasmine,” after his own quote about his favorite flower and nostalgic love for Los Angeles — she pulls out her phone and shows me her background, a black-and-white still from his 1997 film, Lost Highway.

“It’s pretty wild to have a cemetery that holds these historic people,” she says. “I’m not really sure what I believe in terms of the afterlife. I think once you go, your experience is over in the world. So it’s funny to think about known people being buried here. Because in death, everybody’s really the same, aren’t they? Which I think is quite cool.”

“Cool” is a word Charli uses — and thinks about — a lot. She even wrote a Substack essay exploring its concept and contemplating its demise. Charli also reviews films on Letterboxd; those posts range from sharp criticism (Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura: “Spectacular and haunting with landscape shots to die for”) to hilarious takes (The Invisible Man: “Omg hun he’s literally right there”). Her Letterboxd also offers insight into what her husband, George Daniel, the drummer of the 1975, has been digging (he recently saw Mean Girls for the first time and loved it).

“I’m definitely not a snob when it comes to movies,” Charli says. “My taste is all over the place. My dream weekend is getting up late and watching like four films back-to-back, and ordering food. It’s like escaping into another world.” She’s got a burgeoning acting career, too, including a recent, acclaimed performance in Pete Ohs’ Erupcja, where she stars as a tourist in Warsaw who abandons her boyfriend for a childhood friend after fearing he might propose. “I’m desperate to learn and experience a wide variety of things on set,” she says. “I want to soak everything up like a sponge.” 

She sings about acting on the new album, including one dizzying delight where she claims she doesn’t feel embarrassed “even if I suck.” And yet, there’s that internal xcx battle again, that push and pull between caring about and not, which she wrestles with over glitchy instrumentation: “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning 34?” 

Brat drew praise for its conversational lyrics and extreme vulnerability, and she digs even deeper here. “What’s interesting for me about the whole record is that Charli still managed to look in this lyrical way at herself and get to these brutal perspectives that really work with the music,” says Cook. “It has some similarities with the perspectives on Brat, but even more inward. Like, ‘Oh, you thought Brat was diaristic. This is another extreme in a sense.’” 

A Brat follow-up wasn’t something Charli planned on creating quite so quickly. “I was really, really ready to peace out and take a break and not make music,” she says. “I felt very creatively drained and not inspired to write anything new. Then suddenly, inspiration came.” She’s talking about October 2025, when Cook suggested they record while in Paris for fashion week. “I knew that by being thematically at fashion week, she could Method act the whole ‘Charli’s going to record an album in Paris during fashion week,’” he says. “I knew that would get her personality.” Charli loves to work in a tight window of time. “Some of my favorite music that I’ve made in my life has always been made in these quite chaotic, hectic, interim periods where we’re focused,” she notes. 

Recording with Cook and their collaborator Finn Keane in Paris became the theme of the album: More than anything, Charli just really wants to make music with her friends. She dedicates an entire song to Cook, with lines like “Feel so special, just to know you” and “I’d cry if you died.” The pair have been working together since 2015, and they both describe their bond as intrinsic; conversations about the music are mostly unnecessary. (Cook notes that they both share “only-child energy.”) “There’s a bit of an L.A. trope of the armchair psychologist as pop songwriter-­producer. Like, ‘Let’s go into your psyche, into your soul,’” Cook says. “We get to that place almost by not talking about it.” As Charli says, “We communicate our friendship to each other when we make things.”

“People already think
I’m a bitch. I’m very much
at peace with it.”

Cook thought the song dedicated to him was “very sweet,” but he also felt like it was an anomaly on Music, Fashion, Film, admitting that he’s surprised Charli kept it on the album. It’s great that she did, because it’s a highlight, ­featuring Charli’s stream-of-consciousness songwriting and Cook’s chopped guitar, with a trippy tempo change thrown in for good measure. 

When I tell Charli that it sonically reminds me of the Strokes, she stares blankly at me.

“Cool,” she says, followed by nothing else. 

It’s important to note that Charli doesn’t feel that Music, Fashion, Film is a rock record, despite the first song she released from it being called “Rock Music,” and a magazine profile this spring that describes the album as a “rock reinvention.” Strokes comparisons aside, she disagreed with my idea that there’s a link between this album and Cook and Keane’s pseudo-band Thy Slaughter, whose banger “Heavy” Charli contributed vocals to in 2023. “Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said,” she says. “But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way. I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.” 

She’d also like to clear up that hotly debated line — you know, the one where she says RIP to the dance floor. “That lyric is very much about my relationship with Brat, and my personal experience with that album,” she says. “My husband runs a dance-music label. There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”

Charli mentions two other singers she loves: Zara Larsson and Raye. “There’s been a lot of artists who have been doing things for a long time, who are having their moment now,” she says. “Like Zara. I’m so fucking happy for her. And someone who I totally ride for is Raye.” Charli and Raye have been friends for a decade, with Charli co-writing and directing the video for Raye’s “I, U, Us.” “There was a time in our lives when we were together a lot,” Charli says. “And her journey, becoming an independent artist and doing her thing, is really cool.”

Shortly after she released Brat, Charli already had something different in mind. “I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest,” she told Billboard in 2024. “That would definitely be a pretty big swing.” With their mercurial feelings toward interviews and their unconventional career choices, you could say he’s a kind of spiritual godfather. (Charli recently posted Reed’s 1975 avant-garde noise exploration, Metal Machine Music — one of the most returned-to-stores albums in history — to her Instagram stories).  

Charli is a longtime fan of the late Reed and the Velvet Underground (her Letterboxd review of Todd Haynes’ 2021 Velvets doc: “Fuckery, sex, intelligence, great songs, drugs, dirt, the desire for more, sunglasses 24/7, hating L.A. and sometimes really fucking hating each other”). She named her rescue mutt after the singer Nico, and recently featured Velvets co-founder John Cale on the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, for the spellbinding gothic meltdown that is “House.” “I just feel really honored to know him,” she says of Cale. “It’s like, ‘What the fuck?’” As Cale tells us, “Her generosity to my particular history and my current work makes me blush. Her sense of discovery in music and film, it’s got no boundaries.”

Cale appears on the cover of the album, representing music (alongside Marc Jacobs for fashion, and Martin Scorsese for film). “I’d never met either of them until the shoot,” Cale says of the two heavyweights he’s featured with. “She said she had an idea to run by me. Next thing [I knew], I was on a flight. Ended up in a random kitchen.”

But if you were thinking the Velvets were a sonic reference point on Music, Fashion, Film, well, think again. “To be honest, when I make music, I’m thinking less about other music as a reference point. I actually shut myself off, and we just escape into our own world. I’ve spoken at length about loving Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvet Underground. But would I say that the record sounds like any of that? No.”

TWO WEEKS BEFORE our hang in Los Angeles, I meet Charli in Reed’s old neighborhood, New York City’s Lower East Side. We have lunch at Corner Bar, which is near her and Daniel’s apartment (she splits her time between there, Los Angeles, and London). We sit at a table in a private dining room outfitted with royal-blue carpeting, royal-blue wallpaper, and royal-­blue tablecloths. Charli is wearing a black blazer with a sheer striped tank beneath it, a black lacy bra peaking out. She orders a lemon ginger tea, and sets her sunglasses aside. 

Charli lives in the same building as her longtime friend and collaborator Rostam Batmanglij, who tipped her off to an apartment next door to him. She compares the Vampire Weekend co-founder and producer to a sibling, and they’ve become sounding boards for each other. Rostam saw the video for “Rock Music” the night before it came out, describing it as one of his favorite Charli xcx songs to date, while he played her the video for a track from his excellent new album, American Stories. “She was like, ‘I have no notes,’” Rostam recalls. “If Charli has no notes, you gotta know that it’s done.”

“I listen to a lot of my records back, which probably makes me an
evil narcissist.”

In two days, Charli will attend her fourth Met Gala. She’s been collaborating with YSL since last year, becoming creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s muse, and she’ll wear a gown he designed that nods to Vincent van Gogh. As the event approaches, she’s trying to be on her best behavior for it. She tells me about the 2024 Met Gala, when she hung out with Harrison Patrick Smith, who performs as the Dare, the night before her dress fitting. What started out as a viewing of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers became an all-nighter, and the morning after was brutal. “I think I had like, two hours of sleep,” she says. “I was definitely still a little fucked up.” In an effort to keep this year’s Met Gala week low-key, she had a pretty chill evening last night. She had dinner with her friend, musician Troye Sivan, and ignored temptations to go out: “I had swordfish and went to bed.” 

“Should we get burgers?” Charli asks. When I agree, she immediately stands up and takes initiative, walking straight over to our waitress and placing our order. She sits back down, and we dive headfirst back into the new album. I bring up the propulsive closer, “No One Lasts Forever,” which Charli wrote in real time while reflecting on a night out in Paris. The lyrics (“Everyone thinks I’ve got a problem/Since everyone knows my name/That I’m irresponsible and rude/That I’ll put the drugs in my veins”) seemingly allude to the way the internet perceived Charli when she broke out with Brat.

I ask her about the title of the song, and whether it perhaps has to do with the transient nature of life. But as she takes a moment to answer, I realize this isn’t going swimmingly.

“This probably is not helpful for this interview,” she says. “And I really don’t mean to shut you down or anything like that. This isn’t me being a bitch.… I’m just not really that interested in talking about the meaning behind my songs.”

I tell her that she doesn’t need to preface anything, and that I don’t think she’s a bitch. “You never know how it’s going to turn out in text,” she says. “Honestly, I wasn’t saying that for it to be a big deal. It’s just how I feel. People already think I’m a bitch, so … I’m very much at peace with it. It’s cool, and it’s not drama or anything like that. It’s just me trying to do what’s good for me, because it got to a place where my anxiety was physically affecting me, and I can’t actually proceed in life like that.”

Part of easing this anxiety has been scaling back on coffee (she takes it black, usually iced) and planning out how her next tour will be less physically draining. Charli says she has a “complicated relationship” with being onstage, and the Brat tour was exhausting for her, as she was often “rolling around on the floor.” She suffered nerve damage in her neck from the tour — she sings about it on “Rock Music” — and she threw her back out while filming the song’s video. 

I ask Charli about how social media affects her anxiety, and how often she’s on it. Between our conversations on each coast, I noticed that she began posting more and more, whether it was responding to the backlash to “Rock Music” or album-title speculation fueled by her fans (they’re called Angels). “I have actually been a lot more offline,” she says. “I don’t really look as much anymore. It’s just better for my brain. I know people probably won’t believe me, because I am inherently, at least in the past, a very online artist. But I recently have been really struggling with my mental health to the point where, if I’m being real, I’m in the worst place mentally that I’ve been in my life.”

She says she’s a “big believer” in therapy, though she needs to be better at going more consistently. What grounds her the most is spending time with Daniel, ideally in one city she can be in long enough to have some consistency, and creating with her friends. 

Charli is also yearning to have more direct conversations with her fans, which she’s doing through invite-only events, where she can meet listeners and give advice on making art (she attends one after our lunch in New York, and throws another in London in late May). She notes that while Brat was “very conversational and vulnerable,” the marketing campaign — like the giant lime-green wall in Brooklyn — was massive in scale. “Things have changed now,” she says. “I’m interested in making things really intimate between me and my audience, and sitting down one-on-one with a person and having a conversation.” 

This focus is all part of Charli’s new era, part of a new way of prioritizing her time. “I’m of this mindset at the moment that my life will end, as will all of our lives,” she says. “I want to live my life exactly the way that I want to live it, because I don’t get a redo.”

The day before Hollywood Forever, I catch up with Charli at her Rolling Stone cover shoot with Gus Van Sant. Charli wanted a film ­director for the job, hoping specifically for intimate black-and-white photos. It’s yet another stark pivot from her Brat era, and from her recent glossy high-fashion shoots. “It’s less about being hidden behind hair and makeup and wind and drama,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I love shoots like that, too. But with [Van Sant], I really wanted to do something honest.”

“I WANT TO LIVE MY LIFE EXACTLY THE WAY THAT I WANT TO LIVE IT, BECAUSE 
I DON’T GET A REDO.”

Van Sant’s two Australian shepherds, Leo and Burroughs, excitedly roam his Hollywood Hills property, which has a backyard overlooking the Hollywood sign and Griffith Observatory. The kitchen counter holds four packs of Parliaments, Charli’s brand of choice, plus three lemons and a massive bouquet of flowers from Steve Lacy, who recently worked with Van Sant. Charli’s things are all over his bedroom, including a vanity, a rack of her black outfits and heels, and several trays of silver jewelry. 

Standing in his purple Asics, jeans, and a plain black T-shirt, Van Sant captures Charli throughout the house, from his garage to his empty bathtub. “Sorry my buckle is scratching your tiles,” she tells him, wearing a black leather bra and matching shorts. Van Sant continues to snap away on his Leica, gives her his calm, good-natured smile, and tells her not to worry about it. 

Charli and Van Sant have a mutual friend, Matt Copson, who adapted Van Sant’s 2005 Kurt Cobain-inspired film, Last Days, into an opera. The two spoke on the phone not long ago, but only met today. They both have art-school backgrounds — Charli briefly attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she met Copson, while Van Sant went to the Rhode Island School of Design — and have each tried their hand at painting. “We were both escaping from the painting world,” Van Sant tells me after the shoot. “She was painting, and she started doing more performance-based art pieces. And in my case, I worked my way into the film department.”

Signs of Van Sant’s work can be found around the house — the soundtrack to his 1989 film, Drugstore Cowboy, which starred a young Matt Dillon, a photo of him with Dillon on one wall, and a 2021 Gucci photo book featuring some of Van Sant’s photos. Van Sant has been taking portraits for decades; he’d often find himself shooting Polaroids of actors he met with for roles. “You needed a record, because in 1994, there was no internet,” he says. 

Spending time in Van Sant’s home was exactly what Charli needed. “Gus’ vibe is so calm,” she says. Calm is something Charli needs more of, and she’s doing her best to get it. “You know what I really want to do actually, so badly?” she says. “I really want to go to Sweden in the summer. Whenever I go there, I feel this sense of being grounded. A lot of the Scandi people that I know have a very refreshing take on life and on existing in the world.” 

Is she into spas, I wonder? 

“Bitch, get the fuck out of here,” she says. “Yes!”

THE NEXT DAY, at Hollywood Forever, we’re standing in the dimly lit Masonic Lodge. Charli takes her sunglasses off and scans the cozy venue, which opened in 1927 and began hosting concerts in 2008. There are scarlet curtains, rows and rows of empty chairs that give off a Shining vibe, and grand wooden beams on the ceiling. “I’m not super well-versed in all the intricacies of this architecture,” she says. “But it’s pretty extreme, isn’t it?” 

Charli first came to Los Angeles around 2009. There was no groundbreaking arrival — “I don’t have a Miley Cyrus ‘hopped-off-the-plane-at-LAX’ kind of memory,” she says, quoting “Party in the U.S.A.” — but she remembers certain details. She had frozen yogurt for the first time, and attended house parties she likens to the 1996 film Swingers. She didn’t drive, but she’d often get rides with producer Ariel Rechtshaid (who’s also worked with Haim and Vampire Weekend). She’d stay at the now-closed Grafton on Sunset, and recalls sitting at the hotel pool at midnight, eating In-N-Out. She was pretty lonely, 5,000 miles from home, but her career was just beginning.

Charli was born Charlotte Emma Aitchison on Aug. 2, 1992, in Essex, the daughter of Jon, a self-employed businessman, and Shameera, a Gujarati Indian flight attendant and nurse. (She mentions her background on the Music, Fashion, Film cut on “SS26,” cheekily employing corporate-marketing speak: “My heritage could give me quite the USP,” she sings, as in “unique selling point.”) She began writing songs when she was a teenager, so determined that she told Jon her career “wasn’t going anywhere” when she was only 14. Her parents were supportive from the very beginning, funding her first album — the aptly titled 14 — and escorting her to raves in London (Charli repaid them for the album as soon as she was signed). She began posting songs on MySpace under Charli xcx, taken from her celebrity.land Messenger screen name, and caught the attention of an Atlantic A&R rep in 2008. She signed two years later. 

Working with Rechtshaid, Charli released her major-label debut, True Romance, in 2013 (the scorching synth-pop opener, “Nuclear Seasons,” contains a line that’s eerily familiar: “No one lives forever”). Sucker arrived next, in 2014, containing the sugary anthem “Boom Clap,” her first time entering the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist. “Before Brat, I was the girl who sang ‘Boom Clap’ to people who didn’t really know me,” she says. “And now to people who know me from just Brat, I’m the girl who smokes and wears sunglasses and likes the color green.” Few artists can speak about their discography like Charli, who has sharp insights about each era. She revisits her albums often, a rare move for a musician, most recently True Romance and the 2017 EP, Pop 2. “I listen to a lot of my records back, which probably makes me an evil narcissist,” she jokes. 

The 2016 Vroom Vroom EP was a monumental moment for Charli’s career, marking the first time she teamed up with Sophie, the late Scottish producer. The EP — and specifically the exhilarating title track — is now credited for helping pioneer the hyperpop genre, but it was divisive upon release. “Her label thought it was terrible and a total disaster, and they couldn’t understand that it was the same artist that had done ‘Fancy’ and ‘Boom Clap,’” says Cook, whom she met and began working with around this time. “I was really brought in to fight in her corner, for this new style of music and artistry that she was getting into.”

Charli would collaborate with Sophie until her death from an accident in 2021, and she begins to tear up when talking about her friend. “I lost some­one who completely changed my life, and there are a lot of feelings to work through with that, especially because they were so attached to my creative life in a really positive way, but also sometimes in a difficult way,” she says. “Being able to express those feelings through my work has been really cathartic for me.” 

We’re now on the rooftop of Hollywood Forever’s 100-foot-tall, five-story Gower Mausoleum, which features open, concrete passageways and patches of greenery that range from succulents to olive trees. The peacocks continue to screech in the distance, while Charli leans on the railing and stares out intently at the Los Angeles skyline. “Grief is a funny thing for anyone who goes through it,” she says. “Right?” 

As it turns out, the recent Met Gala was a very late night for Charli. That, of course, wasn’t what she originally planned, but come on, she’s Charli xcx — do you really expect her to tuck in at 10 p.m.? And while it sucks to have to deal with a hangover the next day, she knows how to handle it. “I just ride it out,” she tells me, during our last hour together. “Things go better when you get to be silly, when you get into that delirium state. You just gotta maintain the upbeat, happy vibes. Like, maybe have a mimosa.”

I ask Charli how she’s been doing since our conversation in New York about her mental health. She says she’s been talking to her friend, Matty Healy of the 1975 (“He was being … helpful in his way,” she says), but she’s still trying to come to terms with the chatter online. “I am finding it tough to … I don’t know,” she says. “I’m finding my emotions are very, very volatile at the minute, I’ll be honest. You’ve been great. You’ve been really kind and so respectful. It makes me emotional, actually.” 

The shades are on, but I can hear her voice crack. “I don’t always feel safe doing this stuff, but you’ve made me feel pretty safe,” she says. 

Charli isn’t sure about the future, but in the meantime, she’s going to make some music with her friends. She’s about to fly to Paris, where she’ll shoot the fashion-themed video for “SS26.” Brat rearranged her life, but she still has a lot more to create. “It’s funny the way that success can cage you, but I’ve ­experienced such a wide range of success and failure,” she says. “For the people who knew me before Brat, they know the ebbs and flows of my process, and I understand the ebbs and flows of pop music and pop culture. So I feel relatively free in creating whatever I’ll do next.”

As she stands up to leave the graveyard and board her plane, she gives me a hug goodbye.

“Thanks for being so cool.”