Charli xcx Interrogates Her Own Greatness on Music, Fashion, Film: Review

It takes a lot of nerve to place Martin Scorsese, John Cale, and Marc Jacobs on the cover art for a new album called Music, Fashion, Film. It’s three titans of three mediums that permeate our culture, and not a single frame of Charli xcx herself. The absence is the tell. A less interesting artist stages this cover as a coronation: I belong among the greats, look who agrees. Charli, fresh off the now-seminal Brat and its ensuing cultural wave, has earned the right to make that claim. Music, Fashion, Film is not that album. Instead, Charli uses her seventh album to interrogate her own career and wrestle with the cost of pursing artistic greatness — especially set against the depersonalization of fame and, in the case of “SS26” and the David Cronenberg-featuring “No One Lasts Forever,” the meaninglessness of it all. It’s less a victory lap than a war between the persona she built and the self underneath it, between honesty, irony, earnestness, absurdity, and optimism. Using a rock-oriented palette and once again focusing on subverting expectations, Charli xcx crafts an album that destabilizes itself as often as it soars, resulting in an exceptional new chapter in her discography. Get ...