Charli xcx wasn’t planning on releasing new music so soon. In the two years since she dropped Brat, her omnipresent lime-green record that sparked a massive cultural phenomenon, she’s headlined an arena tour, released a remix album and co-produced and starred in a mockumentary. She’s certainly earned a break, but Charli’s not one to ignore inspiration when it strikes.
“I was really, really ready to peace out and take a break and not make music,” she told Rolling Stone last month. “I felt very creatively drained and not inspired to write anything new. Then suddenly, inspiration came.”
What resulted was Charli’s newest LP, Music, Fashion, Film, out today. The album, which features singles “Rock Music,” “SS26,” “Wink Wink” and “Camera,” was recorded last October during Paris Fashion Week — a deliberate move by her producer, A.G. Cook.
“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.’ I knew that would get her personality,” Cook told Rolling Stone.
Charli added, “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 may have bid adieu to the unbridled, hedonistic energy of Brat Summer, but she’s still making music that’s true to her. Below, Yahoo rounded up everything to know about Music, Fashion, Film as Charli steps into her new sonic era.
3 icons on the ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ cover
Among the ways Music, Fashion, Film differs from Charli’s Brat era is in its aesthetic. The album cover, shot by Scottish filmmaker and photographer Aidan Zamiri, who also cowrote and directed her A24 mockumentary The Moment, is iconic in its own right.
“It kind of suggests something cheeky in a way. It’s also about ambition and scale and glamour, but at the same time it’s also very, very real and personal and made by real people,” Charli told Shaad magazine about the cover.
The cover’s black-and-white photograph features Velvet Underground rocker John Cale, fashion designer Marc Jacobs and director Martin Scorsese standing together in a kitchen. Cale, Jacobs and Scorsese serve as a visual representation of the album’s three pillars: music, fashion and film.
Shooting the cover, Charli said, was “like this out-of-body experience.”
“I’ve been so excited to share that image, just because the day that we shot it, which was in April in New York, was such a special day,” she said. “To have Aidan shoot it, and also all of my team, who are all my best friends — and childhood best friends in some cases — to have them all there, it just felt really, like, you know how people use the term ‘shook’?”
To have “three legends” willingly trust her vision for the album cover, shot by Zamiri, whom she described as “an up-and-coming filmmaker and photographer who they don’t particularly know very well,” was surreal.
“Obviously the three people who are on the cover have had very different careers, but they’re very impactful people in my life,” she said. Charli collaborated with Cale on the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, Jacobs was the first person to give her a fashion campaign, and Scorsese is, well, Scorsese. “To have them all being in a room together, it just felt quite magical, and not something that I think I’ll ever really experience again.”
Not another ‘Brat Summer’: How ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ sets itself apart
Music, Fashion, Film is not Brat. While one album is recognized for its lime-green, anti-design aesthetic, the other, with its intimate black-and-white cover and Times New Roman font, is lower-key and more conceptual in its iconography. The upcoming album also marks a shift in Charli’s sonic direction. With Music, Fashion, Film, she’s ushering in a new era.
“All of my albums work in opposites,” she told Rolling Stone. “They repel against each other, and that’s the connective tissue.”
“I knew when I was making [Brat] that I was never going to make that record again,” she added. “It’s not creatively rewarding for me to make the same thing twice.”
If its singles are any indication, Music, Fashion, Film is grittier in its production, more guitar-heavy in its sound and noticeably more melancholic in its lyrics. She’s starkly more self-aware of her celebrity, public scrutiny and the chaos that comes with simply existing.
“It’s funny the way that success can cage you, but I’ve experienced such a wide range of success and failure,” she said. “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.”
She’d rather not dissect her lyrics
Some artists really enjoy diving into the nitty-gritty of their tracks. Charli xcx is not one of them.
“This isn’t me being a bitch. … I’m just not really that interested in talking about the meaning behind my songs,” she told Rolling Stone when asked about the titles of her tracks. “Honestly, I wasn’t saying that for it to be a big deal. It’s just how I feel.”
Charli continued, “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.”
Something else she’d rather not dwell on? Social media.
“I don’t really look as much anymore,” she said. “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.”
This isn’t a rock album
To think that Music, Fashion, Film is a rock album isn’t all that egregious. I mean, she practically declares as much on its lead single, “Rock Music,” in which she sings in her signature Auto-Tune over a distorted, blown-out electric guitar, “Now we’re making rock music.” But while the track signals a shift away from the sound she’d perfected on her delectable dance-pop masterpiece, Music, Fashion, Film is not a rock album.
“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 told Rolling Stone. “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 [fellow music producer] Finn Keane, doing our thing.”
It comes as no surprise that Charli felt compelled to feature Cale on the record in some capacity. She’s made her adoration for the Velvet Underground common knowledge, from declaring her desire to make a Lou Reed record to naming her rescue dog Nico to tapping Cale for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. But inspiration isn’t always rooted in reference.
“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,” she admitted. “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.”
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