In a quick speech before a playback of her seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, at the Metrograph theater earlier this month, Charli XCX touched on the depths of her urge to constantly make things: “The fact that I probably don’t know who I am without being able to make songs and write and create is, I guess, a little bit weird, and depressing.” The animus of a euphoric if sometimes unhealthy relationship to art and work helps explain the breakneck pace of Charli’s output since 2024’s Brat punted the longtime pop star into international celebrity status. She gripped us with that album, radiating club-kid insouciance from the double entendre about key bumps in “365” to the typeface and hue in artwork that equally relayed not giving a shit. Everyone wanted a piece of her disaffected, black-sunglasses’d, borderline puke-green cool; the marketing took hold from “It”-girl circles that foresaw the rise of Addison Rae to U.S. Senate squares who tried to declare Liz Cheney “brat.” But no wave lasts forever, especially in a career like Charli’s that’s as prone to straight-laced pop as to bubblegum rock as to quizzical, acerbic SOPHIE avant-garde. If you followed very long, you could smell the imminent pivot.
