By Will Bishop

Following the release of 2024’s titanic brat, Charli xcx found herself very suddenly atop a high precipice. Simultaneously a newly minted megastar and a critical darling — that rarefied breed of artist who can reach the highest echelons of cultural influence while losing none of their artistic vitality.

Music, Fashion, Film is a highly intimate, deeply personal album with no interest in following up brat as a sequel, but every interest in exploring its impact, particularly the world of limitless opportunities and boundless dreamseeking it opened up for Charli and her tightly wound social scene. Many pop stars maintain a strident commitment to the idea that they really are just like you. They’re still the same person you fell in love with all those years ago, so don’t stop buying all those deluxe editions, because we are in this together. Charli has no interest in selling that image to you. But she isn’t braggadocious either, rather, the album is a delicate treatise on lifelong obsessions, lifelong anxieties, and the enduring endlessness of art. 

With the club aesthetics and sounds of brat decisively stripped away, the album is sonically dissimilar to anything Charli has ever done. At a glance, Charli and longtime producer A. G. Cook turned in their turntables for guitars, but their trademark digital stylings still feel ever present and clearly recognizable.

Introductory track “Rock Music” starts things off with a very classically NYC feeling, ironic anthem, its twitchy, insistent little toy synth, and Charli’s paradoxically earnest sarcasm are reminiscent of an LCD Soundsystem track in the best ways possible. Allergic to metaphor, it’s largely an album in which Charli speaks directly about whatever’s on her mind, whether a sonic love letter to her producer in the form of “Magic Metal Montana,” or her desires to enter the film industry and her relationship with fame on “Camera”.

One exception to this is “Persona,” a track in which Charli utilizes a clever multipronged approach, playing on the modern fascination with easter egg hunting in pop music and Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona to create a bizarre surrealist take on the pop diss track. In a highlight moment at the beginning of “I’m Afraid” — likely the grimmest and most soul-baring track on the album, Charli gently sings “Happiness came in a box.” The true genius of the lyric, and the nature of the song itself, is revealed only when you remember one key word, fashion.

As the album draws to a close, with David Cronenberg softly and creepily hypnotizing you into accepting your own mortality and the mortality of your favorite celebrities, Charli’s current era of pure insatiability begins to make perfect sense. It is, in its own way, a tacit admission that this thing, whether it’s life or just a moment in life. Will fade. Will pass. Will cease to be. So do what you can, while you can. Whether it’s music, fashion, film or all three all at once, every single day for the rest of your life.

Will Bishop is a Cal Poly Humboldt journalism major. He is prone to writing essays about things that bother him and fictional works about things that also bother him, but in different ways.