Charli xcx follows 'Brat' with a hard left turn: 'Music, Fashion, Film' is here
You do not follow the most culturally weaponized pop album of the decade by making it again. Charli xcx knows this better than anyone, which is why Music, Fashion, Film, out today on Atlantic, arrives as a deliberate swerve away from the lime-green mania of 2024's Brat — greyscale where that was neon, allusive where that was blunt.
Start with the cover, which tells you the whole thesis before a note plays. Shot by Aidan Zamiri in stark black and white, it features three men standing in for the title's three disciplines: Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale for music, designer Marc Jacobs for fashion, and Martin Scorsese for film. It is a mission statement disguised as a portrait, and a long way from Brat's deliberately ugly text-on-green.
The rollout stretched across the spring. "Rock Music" landed May 8 — prompting Charli to bat away the obvious question, insisting she "never said" she was making a rock album — followed by "SS26" and June's "Wink Wink." A.G. Cook and Finn Keane anchor the production, keeping the hyperpop scaffolding intact even as the mood turns cooler and more art-directed. The album is compact by design: 11 tracks, barely over half an hour.
The talking point is the closer-adjacent centerpiece, "No One Lasts Forever," which at nearly six minutes is the record's longest song and features filmmaker David Cronenberg — the body-horror auteur lending gravelly spoken-word meditations on mortality. It's a very Charli move: recruit a titan from an adjacent art form, then bend him to the logic of a pop record rather than the reverse.
The origin story helps explain the pivot. By her own account, Charli hit a wall of creative exhaustion after Brat consumed 2024. What pulled her back was a commission — director Emerald Fennell asking her to score a Wuthering Heights adaptation — which reopened the tap through 2025. The result, she has suggested, is less a grand statement than an accumulation: "a collection of songs is an album," and whether it fits neatly into her discography "didn't matter" to her.
Critics have largely met it on those terms. Rolling Stone framed the record as Charli "celebrating her moment" rather than trying to top an untoppable one — a savvy read of an artist who understands that the only losing move after Brat was a sequel. Where that album flattened everyone into one shade of green, Music, Fashion, Film fans back out into texture and reference, name-checking the highbrow while keeping A.G. Cook's plastic sheen underneath.
Whether it detonates the way Brat did is almost beside the point; Brat was a cultural event, and those don't repeat on schedule. What Music, Fashion, Film offers instead is proof that Charli can walk away from her own gravitational center and still land somewhere distinctly hers. Scorsese got the cover. Cronenberg got a verse. The rest of us get an artist refusing to be a brat about her own success.
Sources: Music, Fashion, Film (Wikipedia); NME, tracklist and Cronenberg feature; Variety, Scorsese cover reveal; Rolling Stone review