Is Charli XCX’s music, fashion, film the anti-brat?

Move over, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. Charli XCX has finally announced the details of her long-awaited follow-up to the summer-of-2024-defining album Brat. Please welcome to the stage Music, Fashion, Film, out on July 26.

It’s obvious that the multihyphenate pop star was thinking strategically about her next release; after all, how exactly do you follow up a record that became so singularly influential? It’s not just that the songs went viral with the requisite TikTok dances (“Apple”) and that a subsequent record of remixes gave us the duet of a generation (Charli and Lorde’s honestly legendary “Girl, So Confusing,” which then yielded “work it out on the remix” as slang of our time); it’s that everything else about it became an object to deconstruct and analyze. Discussions about the meaning of the word brat ended up infiltrating the political sphere once Charli called out, “Kamala IS brat” on a tweet. The cover itself, with its modernized take on the Arial Narrow font (they made it even narrower!), set against a neon lime-green background, was instant fodder for parodies and commercial appropriations.

It’s obvious that the multihyphenate pop star was thinking strategically about her next release; after all, how exactly do you follow up a record that became so singularly influential? It’s not just that the songs went viral with the requisite TikTok dances (“Apple”) and that a subsequent record of remixes gave us the duet of a generation (Charli and Lorde’s honestly legendary “Girl, So Confusing,” which then yielded “work it out on the remix” as slang of our time); it’s that everything else about it became an object to deconstruct and analyze. Discussions about the meaning of the word brat ended up infiltrating the political sphere once Charli called out, “Kamala IS brat” on a tweet. The cover itself, with its modernized take on the Arial Narrow font (they made it even narrower!) against a neon-lime-green background, was instant fodder for parodies and commercial appropriations.

The distancing began this summer, when Charli teased she was leaving behind dance music (“the dance floor is dead!” she cheekily claimed) and was going to put out “rock music” instead. While rumors of the dance floor’s death were greatly exaggerated, Charli did release a song called “Rock Music” with a ’90s-inspired black-and-white video that summarized all manner of rock clichés: cigarettes, walking around metropolitan cities, rowdy young boys moshing. She followed it up with “SS26,” a moody, existential track whose lyrics, “When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it / Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell,” were brought to life in a music video that opens with the famous French editor Carine Roitfeld declaring, “Fashion won’t save us,” and ends with models walking off a runway and into a black abyss. (It was directed by David Toro and Solomon Chase, the duo known as Torso, who are best known for their work in fashion—and for directing a short film for Madonna’s dance floor is very much alive upcoming record, Confessions II.)

The cover of Music, Fashion, Film, with its stark black-and-white group portrait of John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese, is the final statement that the Brat era has been left behind. There is nothing so confusing about these white men of a certain age who have been hailed as geniuses and pioneers in their respective fields of, well… music, fashion, and film.

While Jacobs can certainly be considered “brat,” and Scorsese’s penchant for appearing in his daughter’s often viral TikToks (and his excellent cameo on the first season of The Studio) have made him at least brat-adjacent, her singling out of Cale, whose experimental music career is likely a bit unknown to scores of Charli’s fans (or at least it was before she collaborated with the 84-year-old artist on the song “House” for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, with its “I think I’m gonna die in this house” chorus, which has been turned into a popular snippet to create content against on social media). Cale’s presence works as a signal that although Charli loves clothes and loves to party and have a good time, she is serious about her music. Already, some on the internet are talking about the “random men” on the cover, so perhaps it is more important than ever that Charli has decided to open the schools with her record cover and give the children a proper cultural education.

So goodbye, brat summer; this summer we’ll be eating, praying, loving. This summer we’ll be living, laughing, loving. This summer we’ll be Music, Fashion, Film! July 26 can’t come soon enough.

This article is originally from harperbazaar.com 

Lead image: The cover of "Music, Fashion, Film" by Aidan Zamiri, Instagram 

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