Charli xcx Doesn’t Care If You Never Have Another Brat Summer

This art album rich with influences is about what makes her feel

I am personally the best version of myself when a new Charli xcx album is out. With all these heat waves and the fact that summer is my least favorite season, I needed all the help I could get this year.

But I realize I’m not necessarily in the majority any longer, at least as far as internet commentary is concerned. After praising Charli for BRAT two summers ago, all of a sudden, the vibes shifted. If BRAT was met with white hot support, anything that came after it (the Wuthering Heights1 soundtrack and the singles for this newest album) was met with a sort of lukewarm acknowledgment — more of a divided appreciation than a unified embracing. (And if you were on the “BRAT Summer” train of 2024, it felt like we all were experiencing something electrifying and new together.)

The vibes towards Charli actually started to shift before the first single (“Rock Music”) of the new album came out. As you might remember (if you’re on Substack/X), she was widely eviscerated for sharing an off-the-cuff essay on Substack called “The Death of Cool.”

Charli xcx for A Rabbit’s Foot

It was strange to me because this was not her first time posting to Substack, but this one piece in particular really pissed people off. A lot of the outrage came from people thinking she “sounded stupid” or was a “bad writer.” Comments like “wow… never write again” overflowed under her post sharing the Substack piece on X. (You can read even lengthier critical ones on the Substack post itself…)

I remember reading the essay and not understanding what all the fuss was about. Everyone was reacting to a blog post on a platform that’s meant to be as casual or serious as you want it to be in this highly elitist way. There was some mention of her having typos, run-on sentences and grammatical errors, and then some side discussion about how some of her grammatical errors were actually correct in a British standard of writing.

While Charli is someone who doesn’t shy away from a scandalous tweet or quote that could spark an internet debate, this didn’t feel like that. It felt like the previous Substack posts she’d already shared that people seemed to express interest in reading. Charli never claimed to be a novelist or Jane fucking Austen, but the backlash to this one innocuous piece of blogging was ripped apart as if she somehow had.

Essentially, society went from adoring Charli xcx and calling her a genius to doing the thing society always inevitably does to famous women it adores and calls geniuses: deciding that she’s actually a talentless idiot.

We may never know, but I wonder how much of that very specific outrage affected Charli, and if any of it seeped into her inspiration for this latest album, Music, Fashion, Film — a collection that highlights her intellectual pursuits and cultural tastes. Here, she’s showing us more of who she really is: her sense of humor, her preferences, what her interests are, and that she really values culture and art. This is in stark contrast to the fun and irreverent party girl persona from BRAT that made her world-famous two years ago.

Charli never claimed to be a novelist or Jane fucking Austen, but the backlash to this one innocuous piece of blogging was ripped apart as if she somehow had.

As I discussed in my last Charli essay, she’s an artist who seems to always be conducting some sort of social experiment or performance art piece on top of her music. She talked about the mechanics of fame at great length in BRAT era interviews and wrote about it on her Substack. You could argue that she is very aware of the public’s perception of her and even mines it for material.

Charli spoke a bit about the divide between stanning or discarding her (specifically with the BRAT album) in a recent interview on the Nicky at Night podcast:

If something is deemed as ‘fun,’ I think people sometimes have a problem also understanding that as being serious… I think the people who really get that really appreciate that, and I think the people who don’t — um — kind of really have a problem with it and think I’m really stupid or something.”

We weren’t even a month out from the album release when the criticisms started rolling in. Many people seemed to not be trusting the process, judging the entirety of an unreleased album on a few singles (as we often do). The reaction wasn’t as caustic as the “you can’t write and you’re uneducated” Substack accusations, but it was doubtful and prematurely disappointed.

I will admit, “Rock Music” confused me on the first few listens. Then, slowly, I began to appreciate the humor in it. It feels tongue-in-cheek, perhaps making fun of the manicured pop stars who eventually don the “rock ‘n roll, I LOVE NEW YORK!” brand a few albums into their career. The lyrics are devoid of experience and emotion (I’m really banging my head / I’m really hurting my neck) while claiming to love making rock music.

You could argue she is very aware of the public’s perception of her and even mines it for material.

When “SS26” and “Wink Wink” came out, it confirmed that self-aware humor and cheekiness were going to be a theme on this album. “Camera,” the most recent single that came out this week ahead of the album release, is a moment where the vision finally starts coming together for the listening audience. It’s the most personal and genuinely self-aware of the previous three singles. In the lyrics, Charli expresses conflicting emotions about feeling self-conscious regarding trying new things and taking risks in her art. Again, the theme of “perception” comes up.

Do I wanna make music?

Am I being fuckin’ stupid

if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning thirty-four?

The chorus is a repetitive earworm that’s effective in its insistence that this album is about her internal life and psyche:

But all I know is how it makes me feel

And it makes me feel how it makes me feel

Yeah, it makes you feel how it makes me feel

Yeah, it makes me feel how it makes me feel

It seems apt that an album dedicated to the art she’s influenced by — with the cover being a black-and-white photo of icons John Cale (Music), Marc Jacobs (Fashion) and the one and only Martin Scorsese (Film) posing together — would contain songs with influences you can often recognize right away.

The black-and-white photography and videography of the album art and promo campaign, the fashion choices (down to the makeup and hair), and the music itself reminded me immediately of PJ Harvey (specifically her Rid of Me era). “SS26” fittingly carries the soft electronic and house elements of 90s runway music. The B-side “Playboy Bunny” is bursting with art punk influences (Sonic Youth comes to mind). The folk pop and minimalist rock sounds of The Velvet Underground (see: John Cale) ring through in several of the tracks. The riffs and synth of some Music, Fashion, Film songs are reminiscent of French bands like Le Tigre and The Teenagers. “Wink Wink” specifically is heavily influenced by The Teenagers song “Homecoming” — from the lo-fi beat down to the slightly irreverent spoken lyrics.

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Upon a full listen of the album, you can hear that the singles are definitely the most “commercial” of the track listing. Songs like “Card Declined,” “I’m Afraid” and “Yeah” are more straight-forwardly avant-garde punk — edgier, with a quality of grit and rawness. Mixed in are the tracks with an inherent cinematic quality (again, fittingly), most appropriately in “Camera” — a song about her decision to pursue acting after BRAT. Many of the tracks feel as if you could plop them right into the middle of a Sofia Coppola film and they’d fit right in.

Speaking of Air (meaning 50% of the songs that appear on Sofia Coppola’s soundtracks2): Charli already told us what direction her music was going in with the below performance of “Cherry Blossom Girl” last summer. Pared down, bare bones, floaty and light in white, Charli was clearly leaning into a new aesthetic.

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Similarly, her pop-up shows to promote the album are once again in stark contrast to the BRAT shows and the SWEAT Tour. Those performances were all rather minimally produced, with only Charli onstage holding a microphone and dancing/headbanging/sliding around on the floor against a backdrop of a screen with flashing words lit by flashing club lights (complimentary). In the Music, Fashion, Film performances, a small live band surrounds her onstage. For many of the songs, she stands mostly still and uses a mic stand.

photo by Alana Bennett

I enjoy watching a performer who studies the power of perception and manipulates it or lets it breathe. I appreciate the change of course from an artist who spent an entire summer getting us to blast ferociously loud hyper pop beats until our ears almost bled. I am intrigued by this new understated but purposeful era and so far, I can already say that I personally love the album. But this was a given. I was probably going to like it (or at least appreciate it) no matter what.

So why did I write this piece? Maybe to geek out about all the direct influences I thought I heard while listening to this new album. Or maybe to get you to analyze why your first instinct when a famous woman tries something new is to dismiss it and her (something I have also been guilty of). Maybe it was to highlight an artist who is open about feeling misunderstood, in hopes to understand more myself and get other people to as well.

Here’s one thing I really hope you understand, if you didn’t already:

No matter the stylistic choices of her music, there is always something inherently punk rock about Charli xcx: from challenging the way we think about genre or what kind of music can top billboards, to playing with the public’s tastes and distastes, to saying something rage-baity like “I think the dance floor is dead” and letting the internet fight over it for a few days, to screaming at the top of her lungs in the intro of a live song3, to spitting on the floor of a stage and then licking it back up, to ending an album with words spoken by David Cronenberg on a distorted loop:

They are dead.

They are gone.

No one lasts forever.

I used to think BRAT was the album Charli always wanted to make, but now I’m starting to think it’s actually Music, Fashion and Film; BRAT just helped her get there. Experimentation and reinvention are what define her as an artist — not a brand, a color or a catchphrase. With that in mind, perhaps the next project is the one she’s always wanted to make.

Regardless, it doesn’t matter what we think of this new music or if we miss the old music. As she said in her Subway Takes interview in 2025, “music is not important.” She went on to explain that artistry is what’s important. Music, Fashion, Film celebrates Charli xcx’s own diversely creative skill, while also paying homage to the artists who inspire her. In a world ruled by trends, thoughtless content, copycats and making things just for clicks, we could use an album that acts as an audial shrine to artistry.

For anyone who doubted whether or not Charli was a “real artist” capable of making “real art,” this album and its rollout may be the perfect response.

Originally published on my Substack, the glitching hour