Not long ago I finally watched Crash by David Cronenberg. Though I’ve long admired Cronenberg, the master of visceral horror, awe, and fetished desire, I spent years confusing his work with the 2004 thriller bearing the same title that I had to study in high school to unpack complexities of racial tension. Cronenberg’s Crash isn’t about race. It centers on people who fetishize death and become aroused by car crashes. It’s a remarkable film.
One memorable moment features the unsettling observer Vaughan, portrayed by Elias Koteas, re-enacting James Dean’s fatal crash as though hosting a DIY show. After recreating the crash, Vaughan hauls the body from a crumpled Porsche, delivering the line “James Dean died of a broken neck and became immortal.” Off-camera, he frets that it was too “glib.” It isn’t — it captures the paradox of art, death, and legacy. It’s also a crucial piece of Music, Fashion, Film. Put simply, Charli XCX’s seventh studio album (outside of mixtapes, soundtracks, etc.) carefully ties together the passions that have transformed her into the pop culture visionary she is today. Music, Fashion, Film may not be as tabo o as Cronenberg’s Crash, but as a pop record it feels like her most dangerous while still sounding like Charli at her most at-ease.
Charli XCX has always understood pop music as a dialogue between worlds: music speaking to fashion, fashion speaking to film, celebrity speaking to identity. Her work has never been solely about the song itself, but about the intricate machinery around it — the personas we craft, the fantasies fans project, and the uncomfortable gap between who someone is and who we want them to be. Her latest album embodies how all these bizarre, chance facets of taste and exploration must exist to push the conversation around herself, pop music, collaboration, etc. Music, Fashion, Film is the culmination of that obsession. This album serves as a totem for how each form becomes a language for understanding the others.
Brat was its own beautiful, vomit-green spectacle. It explored vulnerability and persona from an artist who has interrogated the limits of pop stardom ever since her purple-hued debut True Romance. Its follow-up may swing sonically like a pendulum, yet it feels like a sister album in how it pushes listeners into even more uncomfortable territory. Through infectious MySpace-pop melodies and gritty guitar distortion, Charli wrestles with creative grief and discovers that its spirit has inhabited a new project. And lyrically, it doesn’t read like diary entries or a talk with a close friend. It’s more refined. It’s heavier. It’s honest but perhaps not as candid as Brat felt.
Where Brat had a remix companion that had Charli in conversation with other pop musicians about media-driven feuds, grief, fame, and partying, Music, Fashion, Film has a singular, brilliant guest — Cronenberg himself. On the closing track and MFF’s emotional thesis “No One Lasts Forever,” he isn’t singing or adding any body-exploding visual effects; there is no working it out on the remix with death. After Charli converses about reality and philosophy with a French girl amid sparse guitar zaps and pearly synths, we’re invited into Charli XCX and David Cronenberg’s deep dialogue. The excerpt used recalls Vaughan’s James Dean line: “I mean, we could talk about immortal artists of various kinds and it could turn out that yes, some artists have created art that has truly survived thousands of years and that’s wonderful. But experientially, for them, they are dead. They are gone. They are not experiencing that.”
Cronenberg doesn’t speak of death with sadness nor weigh legacy with heaviness after an artist’s passing. “Thank goodness for them, I really feel,” he continues. “And you hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom.” His words stretch and warp until they feel almost physical, like memories melting. It makes me think of Steve Reich. The track moves toward something like freedom: Oblivion is not tragedy, it’s release.
It reframes the opening verses of the album, those about being pigeonholed by Brat’s coke-fueled ethos or its career-defining marketing push, into clearer focus. So do earlier meditations on celebrity, creativity, and the entertainment machine, like “Do I want to make music?/ Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen when I’m turning 34?” (“Camera”), or “All this pain makes me believe I’m a better artist now/ An excuse I tell myself to act selfishly” (“I’m Afraid”). Morbid as it is, eventually we’ll run out of capacity to overthink these matters, so why waste time fretting now? There’s no way of knowing what our legacy will be. Just make the thing.
If you really listen to this album, MFF blows the meta-marketing of Brat off the table like a misfired blast. The discourse around Brat, especially online as each version unfolded, revolved around deciphering who and what each song was about. By tackling those ideas in the remix, Charli gave that album a soft counterweight to the tension each track mythologized. Our world has become obsessed with inside information as a form of power and control in the guise of being closer to someone’s creative persona.
As I delved deeper into MFF, I found myself slipping into the trap of trying to spot every reference and make sense of them. But every time I reached the Cronenberg segment, I reminded myself I didn’t want to overthink it.
This is a pop album that invites thinking and challenges you to feel. It’s existential and silly, sentimental and sincere, ridiculous and devastating. It nods to the Teenagers and Lou Reed and feels like it could soundtrack a Sofia Coppola film.
At times, that feeling doesn’t carry any concrete meaning, only the freedom to change one’s mind (“Yeah”). Other times, it’s the tangible certainty that a new pair of shoes or handbags might confer (“Card Declined”). With Music, Fashion, Film, as Charli has done with several of her albums, she offers both the finished product and the behind-the-scenes process. MFF also features a visual film that traces the evolution of tracks and the accompanying visual language. Both spark something and neither is more true than the other; the entire process demonstrates that artifice — from creative persona to fantasy to a sense of danger — speaks to the soul, surfacing for a moment.
Is art meant to save us? Is anything truly going to save us? If art outlives us, does that make it more important? From the outset there’s a note of nihilistic freedom: there is no salvation. MFF carries a deep tension: art won’t save you, but it will outlive you. The album’s world is lined with mall nihilism and ego-maximizing, with people trying to buy, build, and perform themselves into existence. Yet what keeps MFF afloat isn’t cynicism but a renewed gratitude that the most essential memory survives in the people we love and know, even if that memory will fade too eventually.
These weighty questions don’t bog the album down, though some verses edge toward a lyrical pile-up. Instead, Charli leans into what she does best to navigate stormy questions. She throws parties and creates things with her friends. She spends time with the people she loves most.
Those friends — producers A. G. Cook and Finn Keane — remain her strongest collaborators. Throughout, MFF balances sardonic and fragile lyric tones with vibrant and austere textures. It sounds like a collision between late-2000s blog-house and a forgotten Britpop era (for example, the Blur-leaning Yeah). Musically, the album looks to the past for its thrill rather than nostalgia. There are hints of new wave (“Magic Metal Montana”), old-school rock ’n’ roll, late-2000s indie, and the odd digital optimism of the early internet. The guitars feel influenced by the era of Daft Punk-inspired electronic rock, while the drums often carry the texture of a live studio take. The whole album is cotton candy and gunpowder, whereas Brat was a volatile liquid, flammable and acidic.
Charli celebrates her friends and collaborators even when they aren’t physically present, ghosts of creative relationships that exist less as biographical references than emotional imprints. We hear emo Charli channeling Yung Lean on “I’m Afraid,” borrowing his familiar melancholy and turning it inward. The album’s gloomiest track also feels like it could have emerged from those Wuthering Heights writing sessions, letting Victorian-era melancholy unleash something furious and feral in her that seems Cobainian.
A significant portion of this album’s emotional power comes from Charli loosening some of the armor that has long defined her vocal work. The lean use of Auto-Tune doesn’t imply she’s suddenly revealing a hidden, “real” version of herself — the vulnerability has always been there. Instead, she’s more comfortable letting those cracks show. The persona remains, but it isn’t being used to hide anymore.
That idea informs “2007,” a song about the imagined mythology of being a pop star in your bedroom. It’s sentimental but not exactly nostalgic. It’s about TikTok, yet it could just as easily be about the pre-internet world when posters on a teenager’s wall were a fan’s closest link. It captures the boredom, the longing, and the strange ache of projecting a whole future onto an idea of yourself. It evokes the digital loneliness of artists like Yeule — the sensation of living inside a constructed world because the constructed world can feel more exciting than reality.
Pop music has always promised immortality: we’ll stay young forever, this moment will never end, I love you forever. Charli does something radical by refusing to pretend. She reminds us that the fantasy was never real, and that is precisely why it was beautiful. It feels like a favor. It feels like grace.
Vaughan believed death creates immortality. Cronenberg contends that immortality doesn’t matter because the dead are gone. Music, Fashion, Film lives somewhere between those beliefs. It understands that fantasies aren’t real. Pop stardom isn’t real. Forever isn’t real. But phantasmically, the feelings they evoke do exist.
Some art isn’t trying to save you. It’s trying to keep you company while nothing saves you and all the people who created it are gone.
Music, Fashion, Film is out now via Atlantic.
