Album of the week: Charli xcx – 'Music, Fashion, Film'

“I think the dancefloor is dead (it’s totally dead) / So now we’re making r-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-c-k music” – album eight, track one: ‘Rock Music’

And so, with a stuttering, raised-fist, blank-eyed manifesto, Charli xcx proclaims that she’s bringing the curtain down on an everything-everywhere-all-at-once era. Starting two intense years ago, the world of Brat – the Cambridge-born artist’s sixth album – gifted us a brace of club-igniting, world-wowing, electro-pop anthems (‘Von Dutch’, ‘360’, ‘Apple’). A “new”, 31-year-old pop star. A triple-Grammy-winning record that became a cultural juggernaut. One-woman-and-her-microphone festival headline slots. A fresh kind of rockumentary (this year’s underappreciated satire The Moment). A Wuthering Heights soundtrack collab that became a very different kind of moment. A handful of forgettable acting gigs. And a whole new colourway for cool.

Now, though, it’s time to move on from those Olympian triumphs. We’re leaving the club for the moshpit, woot! Having bossed one genre, we’re hopping onto and reinventing another. We’re gonna wash that slime-green right out of our hair.

Well, kinda. Music, Fashion, Film might attempt to proclaim its genre-trashing, lane-switching, game-changing credentials with cover art featuring John Cale, Martin Scorsese and Marc Jacobs, not to mention a closing track that features David Cronenberg. But over its short 11 songs and concise 30 minutes, while it still brings the fun, it's a good bit less revelational than Charli would have us believe.

Rather than evoking the disparate, kaleidoscopic worlds of its title, Music, Fashion, Film cycles through eras of indie, indie, indie, notably in its five-song middle section. ‘Card Declined’ is the pale-faced New Wave of The Passions’ 1981 one-hit-wonder ‘I’m in Love with a German Film Star’, as filtered through the sludgy grunge of Dinosaur Jr. ‘Camera’ is a conflicted post-mortem on the face-eating mask of acting (“when the camera’s on… I can finally be totally honest… it’s like I’m looking down the barrel of a gun… fucking shoot me”). Evoking the bright, sparkling guitars and keyboards of Orange Juice, Aztec Camera or one of their peers on ground-zero Eighties Glasgow label Postcard, it thereby manages to yoke The Sound of Young Scotland to The Angst of Millennial East London.

With its jittery guitars, stabbing synths and burnt-out ennui, ‘2007’ could be a Franz Ferdinand b-side from the Difficult Third Album sessions they were embarking on in that very year. ‘I’m Afraid’ – breathy and breathless vocals over sawing, squalling guitars – is a My Bloody Valentine c-side, which is still a great thing. ‘Yeah’ is Klaxons on a particularly harsh comedown.

In that middle chunk, in careering from New Wave to New Rave and all indie points in between, Charli xcx is less making r-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-c-k music than spinning around, self-referentially tweaking the nose of her own success. Elsewhere, though, she’s more on-brand/on-marketing. ‘Rock Music’ has a raw, buzzsaw-riff swagger that means it pretty much does what it says on the tin. Glorious sad banger ‘SS26’ is Fleetwood Mac’s California rock for the doom generation (“spring/summer ’26 / when the world is gonna end no hope for anything / we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film”).

‘Wink Wink’ offers up the thrilling sound of a synthpop Strokes fronted by sulky and knowingly hilarious woman-child pop star cancelling-not-cancelling her two-year Brat omniscience: “I used to say scream if you wanna faster but then I sold my Porsche / my friend Rostam told me I dress like a slut / so now I shop at APC / I don’t know why you don’t believe me”.

Charli xcx presents Music, Fashion, Film | Full Film - YouTube

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‘Persona’ is equally exciting, its discordant keyboards and buzzsaw riffs so old-school, gnarly and basic they sound like they took 50p and five minutes to record – but, brilliantly, they’re topped with a gorgeous melody. ‘Magic Metal Montana’ is, again, The Strokes at their most skinny-tied and amphetamined, with Charli proclaiming her autotuned love for her friend and collaborator, the producer/songwriter AG Cook.

Finally, as is very well known by an artist who only became a Proper International Success after six albums, comes a meditation on the fact that nothing in pop, in art, is a given. So, on the glitchy electro of the closing ‘No One Lasts Forever’, she pre-empts her own demise, albeit blessed with the heft of being able to use a speech from Cronenberg – a soliloquy on the film director’s near-death experience – to drive home the message. “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” the Canadian auteur intones, repeatedly, to fade, the sound of Charli xcx having her obsolescence and eating it.

Brat summer is dead, long live Brat summer.