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Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The primary impulse I have after listening to Charli XCX\u2019s new album is not to debate whether it\u2019s the proper, or perhaps properly improper<\/em>, follow-up to the pop singer\u2019s 2024 season<\/a>-and-color<\/a>-and-lexicography<\/a>-defining hit record Brat<\/em>. It\u2019s to be in an arena, shouting along to David Cronenberg intoning, \u201cThey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,\u201d as he does over and over at the end of the final track of Music, Fashion, Film<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a sample from a conversation Charli XCX had with the 83-year-old Canadian body-horror auteur<\/a> last year about a health crisis in which he collapsed on the sidewalk. She asks what went through his mind in that moment: Did he think about his art? Of course not, he says. He thought about people, about life. Art is not about immortality\u2014if it lives on beyond its makers, they\u2019ll never know, and they are much better off that way. \u201cHear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom,\u201d he insists. \u201cThey are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.\u201d<\/p>\n