FIRST THOUGHTS ON CHARLI XCX’S ‘MUSIC, FASHION, FILM’
words by FRANCESCO PIZZUTI
Charli has always understood her own mythology, and after Brat, she proved she could comment on her career as a living case study on the volatility of fame, pop culture, and the music industry. But apparently her fame is not that volatile yet; she clearly still has a few tricks up her sleeve.
With her new album, Music, Fashion, Film, Charli seems to be moving away from the Brat era in a very coherent way. Songs like Rock Music and SS26, which recently came out as singles, have already brought a newly rock-inflected direction along with some existentialist fashion world references. It feels more controlled, less chaotic, but still very much brewing underneath. And now, with the album cover drop on Instagram, she once again confirms herself as one of the coolest artists of the moment.
image courtesy of WARNER MUSIC BENELUX
Here are some of our first thoughts on the cover and the album:
Music, Fashion, Film sounds like an album title, an elevator pitch, a magazine category section, and something you overhear someone says while smoking outside a party.
It is very Charli to make the concept incredibly explicit and obvious and still make it feel like it needs decoding.
SS26 as a title is interesting. Very temporally grounded. Fashion season as a timeline. Feels almost like a warning.
“We’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell” feels like a central image of this album’s awareness: glamorous and doomed.
The artwork featuring John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese feels visually random at first, and then immediately incredibly on point. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that tiny room.
The combined presence of these usually unrelated, almost mythical figures makes the whole thing feel like an art-school moodboard that got a major-label budget.
She’s making it very clear with this cover that she’s operating on a completely elevated level: Charli is not just a singer, she’s a full 360° artist. And what better way to prove that than by channelling major figures from each discipline she moves through?
Rock Music brings in that Charli thing where intimacy always looks like performance, and performance always feels a bit too intimate.
The lyrics out so far seem to sit in that duality between confidence and collapse; recklessness and awareness. “I’d rather take the easy road”, followed by “I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes”, is a little dark, yet honest enough to feel relatable.
Something even more relatable: the fashion week existential spiral.
The cover feels very raw. Black and white opposed to the neon green of the previous era. Curious to see how this will reflect in the music production aspect.
Lastly, as we know, Music, fashion, film is the title; and so far, she’s already started mapping it out. We’ve had the music with the new track title Rock Music, and the fashion with SS26. Now the real question is: how is the film element going to reveal itself within the album?
Either way, it already feels like Charli knows exactly what world she wants us to enter; all we can do is sit back and wait patiently.
