Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape isn’t really about death; it’s about the uneasy hope that art might preserve something of us after we’re gone. Beckett wasn’t questioning death. He knew that was a certainty. He was questioning life. And so is Charli XCX.
In the final moments of “No One Lasts Forever”, the finale of her seventh studio album Music, Fashion, Film, filmmaker David Cronenberg recounts a near-death experience. “I did not think about art at all,” he confesses. “And it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years / And that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them, they are dead / They are gone.” On “SS26”, the 365 party girl proposes a similar dilemma early on: “Nothing’s going to save us, not music, fashion, or film.”
Music, Fashion, Film feels like XCX’s Krapp’s Last Tape: an artist looking back on her oeuvre and asking, “so, what?”
XCX’s last album, Brat, was the sort of rare cultural phenomenon that captured the attention of the zeitgeist. More than a pop alum, it was an attitude, a colour, an entire season and, somehow, even a talking point in the 2024 US election. It catapulted XCX to mainstream stardom, the breakthrough most artists spend the rest of their careers chasing.
But Charli XCX isn’t most artists. After six albums, three mixtapes, and a decade spent on the fringes of the mainstream, the success she’d been circling had finally arrived. But instead of confirming everything that came before it, Brat threatened to eclipse it. So she buried it. “Brat Summer is dead,” she declared.
It’s in the aftermath that we arrive at the thirty-minute existential crisis of Music, Fashion, Film. Recorded in the same city where Beckett spent five decades unravelling the meaning of life, Music, Fashion, Film reflects the anxiety of contemporary existence by allowing Paris to inform its perspective. It draws heavily from the city’s alt-rock underground and the verité of French cinema.
A.G Cook and Finn Keane, XCX’s trusted friends and collaborators who also perform as alt-rock band Thy Slaughter, reconstruct XCX’s synthpop vocabulary using guitars, analogue drums and reverb. But Music, Fashion, Film isn’t a rock album. It’s the idea of one. The result is a fusion of bloghouse electronica and nostalgic guitar music that feels unlike anything else in the XCX catalogue.
The songwriting isn’t too radical a departure from Charli’s XCXisms, either. Her trademarks remain: spoken-word confessions, diaristic, matter-of-fact lyrics that border on stream of consciousness, and repeated hooks that become songs unto themselves. Against an analogue backdrop, they land differently. For the first time, XCX sounds human — her voice no longer swathed in layers of Auto-Tune.
The tracks here are short, sometimes frustratingly so. They rarely resolve into fully realised pop songs, feeling instead like sketches that are less interested in resolution than contemplating it. It makes the experience of Music, Fashion, Film feel more like an essay than a pop album, and its songs back this up.
“SS26” sits at the opposite end of the pop music spectrum to The Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling”. It’s acerbic nihilism dressed in Saint Laurent: a lo-fi guitar ditty that subverts the optimism of the indie rock it draws from to lament the state of the world. “We’re walking down a runway that goes straight to hell,” XCX sings, unbothered.
That nonchalant coolness helps the hopelessness of Music, Fashion, Film never come across as bleak, but rather relatable. It’s existential dread with emotional resonance. The Brat girl was chaotic. The Music, Fashion, Film girl is contemplative.
On paper, Music, Fashion, Film is as close to Brat‘s antithesis as you can get. The in-your-face chartreuse has been replaced with grainy greyscale. The cover art poses John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese (Music. Fashion. Film. Duh) in a derelict kitchen like three harbingers of the apocalypse. If Brat is a Marlboro Gold, Music, Fashion, Film is a Vogue Slim. In classic XCX irony, it’s something Music, Fashion, Film is aware of and plays into. “I think the dance-floor is dead,” XCX declares on the noisy opener “Rock Music,” while “Card Declined” takes the hedonistic “can we do another?” consumption of Brat to its logical, catatonic conclusion.
There’s a solemn beauty to the chiaroscuro world XCX builds around Music, Fashion, Film. It’s walking along the cobblestones of the Seine in pointy stilettos. It’s crawling through Le Marais after a night of bar-hopping smoky speakeasies, wearing a vintage slip dress you bought that same day. The sun is rising, you need to pee, but the Metro is still closed, so you sit on the steps, smoke another cigarette, looking moody, but serving absolute cunt.
Brat asks, “Who am I?” Music, Fashion, Film says, “Who fucking cares?”
The relationship between the two albums runs deeper than XCX might care to admit. Spend enough time with Music, Fashion, Film and the conversation with its predecessor becomes clear. Like Krapp listening back to his younger self, XCX revisits the questions she spent Brat avoiding, this time from the other side of the experience.
The clearest example is “Magic Metal Montana”. Written for longtime collaborator A.G. Cook, it feels like a sister song to Brat‘s “So I,” a eulogy to late producer SOPHIE. Where “So I” is haunted by the guilt of things left unsaid, “Magic Metal Montana” is what happens from the other side of experiencing loss. “I’d cry if you died,” XCX sings to Cook, now knowing it’s best to do it while he’s still in the room with her.
On “I’m Afraid”, she worries about failing at marriage before undercutting herself: “This pain makes me believe I’m a better artist now / An excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.” Art, XCX realises, is inseparable from ego. It’s a marked shift from “I Think About It All the Time”, where XCX wondered whether motherhood was the life she’d eventually regret not choosing. Here, she’s less interested in the futures she might miss than the consequences of the one she’s living.
Brat‘s “Sympathy Is A Knife” and “Girl, So Confusing” revealed an artist consumed by the way other people perceived her. On Music, Fashion, Film’s “Camera”, she concerns herself with the only opinion that matters: her own. Framed as a confession, “Camera” uses XCX’s recent venture into cinema to entertain the idea of leaving music behind. “It makes want to throw my life away,” she muses. It isn’t cinema she craves, but the risk of it. She’s flirting with annihilation simply to feel alive.
Charli XCX is asking fewer questions, and she’s stopped arguing with the answers she’s gotten — even if they lead to certain doom.
How do you say “brat” in French?
