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Jul 24, 2026 Web Exclusive By Austin Saalman

“Yeah, we’re on to the next / I think the dance floor is dead,” declares modern pop visionary Charli XCX on the opening track of her phenomenal new album, Music, Fashion, Film. This declaration, of course, speaks to phenomena far more significant than merely the exhaustion of pop music in the hyper-commodified 21st century and the long-awaited replenishment of the rock genre; instead, such an observation serves to illustrate a greater cultural shift, rendering the suggestion of such evolutionary perseverance uncertain and far less optimistic than initially assumed. Accordingly, Charli’s newest work resembles not a celebration of things to come but a lamentation of what has been lost in a mechanized, materialistic modern world whose collective cultural ethos is primarily informed by an undeniably profound hatred of beauty, creativity, and the qualitative. Simply stated: Music, Fashion, Film is a soundtrack to the end of the end of history.

“Yeah, we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to Hell,” Charli sings on “SS26,” among the album’s most poignant and arresting cuts. “Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.” This proclamation, in all its sorrowful resignation, may be the decade’s most telling lyric. It is here that the artist—herself a lifelong avant-garde experimentalist and empathetically observant underdog, humorously masquerading as a spectacular global pop star—admirably, and appropriately, addresses the grotesque cultural implosion, brought about by a century of industrial superstition and increasingly anti-human sentiment, from which her newest work has emerged. Moreover, insult is added to injury by Music, Fashion, Film’s blatantly grim artwork, in which are featured a weathered John Cale, an aloof Marc Jacobs, and a stoic Martin Scorsese. These icons, each representative of one of the album title’s three mediums, are captured in a somber black and white glare, and resemble grizzled veterans of a bygone era—more a spectral trio of melancholy soldiers, since returned from a battle that was lost from the start—more than they do creative goliaths who long ago rose to prominence as major advocates of art for art’s sake. Cale serves as an especially significant inclusion here, not only due to his role as a prior collaborator of Charli’s but also to his status as a distinguished and inimitable songwriter whose work both as a solo artist and founding member of The Velvet Underground has often expressed far less interest in serving capital than utilizing the transcendent powers of art in elevating the listener to higher echelons of aesthetic experience.

Throughout Music, Fashion, Film, Charli XCX vividly depicts the remnants of our irreparably ruptured era, this phantasmagoric fever dream of nonbeing in which ghostly nostalgias and idealistic fantasies bleed into representations of a fairly recent pop cultural history, whose mass recollection has become so warped and oversaturated as to feel wholly unreal now. This uncanny simulacrum, in which past, present, and future are constantly ebbing and flowing, never lingering long enough to provide any meaning amidst the fathomlessly vacuous confusion and apathy in which we find ourselves inexorably mired, serves as the backdrop against which the album unfurls. This is entirely apparent on “Rock Music,” “2007,” and “Yeah,” as well as more subtly implied on standouts “Magic Metal Montana” and “I’m Afraid,” whose sonic strangeness sounds at once intimately familiar and impenetrably alien. This quality, which permeates much of Music, Fashion, Film, serves as a demonstration of Charli’s distinctive brilliance as an artist, able to effectively translate this inner vision into her music.

Simultaneously, Music, Fashion, Film finds Charli continuing the achingly introspective tone she perfected on 2024’s Brat, the artist striving to evolve against the entropic degeneration of a quickly disintegrating modernity as she adjusts to her 30s. Such expressions of personal strife serve to counterbalance the weight of the album’s overarching sociocultural critique, with Charli speaking once more of her own apprehensions and aspirations. “Am I being fucking stupid / If I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning 34?,” she inquires on the infectious “Camera,” contemplating the inevitability of aging within a ravenous pop cultural spectacle notorious for commodifying feminine youth and fetishizing ideals of its perceived purity. Meanwhile, on the aforementioned “I’m Afraid,” Charli confides in the listener her conflicted emotions concerning her recent marriage to 1975 drummer George Daniel, singing, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid / I’m nothing without him / What if I ruin it? / Take the ring, take the ring.” Elsewhere, Charli offers a slyly humorous, tongue-in-cheek take on aging, claiming to have abandoned the freewheeling and reckless ways of her youth, insisting that, despite the controversially sensational reputation she’d once courted, she’s “not a bad girl anymore.” This assurance, however, is followed by a facetious “wink wink.”

Music, Fashion, Film’s finest moment arrives at its conclusion, on the epic “No One Lasts Forever.” It is here that Charli examines herself in the context of an era, exploring her fame and persona, challenging critics’ perceptions of herself, and contemplating the ephemeral nature of material existence. Beyond her frequent oscillation between confidence and insecurity, ego and nonbeing, Charli reminds the listener that “no one’s gonna last forever”—not her and certainly not us—a concept previously explored on 2022’s underrated “Twice.” This moving meditation is followed by a terrific appearance by filmmaker and dark oracle of modernity David Cronenberg, whose influence is felt heavily throughout Charli’s often unfairly dismissed Crash. In his characteristically philosophical tone, Cronenberg discusses art, death, and the absurdity of striving for immortality. In reference to those artists whose works have endured across millennia, achieving a sort of symbolic immortality in their own right, the legendary director states, “Experientially, for them, they are dead, they are gone. They are not experiencing [their own legacies].” Cronenberg then quickly reassures us, “Hear me…oblivion is freedom.”

Music, Fashion, Film serves as yet another remarkable achievement for Charli xcx, who is, at least in this writer’s mind, by far the era’s most interesting and innovative superstar. May her newest offering inspire necessary conversations concerning art, humanity, and worldly experience, as well as what we have most certainly lost and, perhaps, what we might yet gain at the end of the end of history. (www.charlixcx.com)

Author rating: 8.5/10