Charli XCX Channels Velvet Underground on New Album
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- Charli XCX released a new album titled "Music, Fashion, Film," conceived during Paris Fashion Week last fall and running about 30 minutes, framed by its creator as a broadside against overthinking the artistic process with glitch-kissed analog instrumentation.
- The album's producers A. G. Cook and Finn Keane built a "digital drag-and-drop collage" of Velvet Underground ingredients — tinny guitars evoking the Velvets' 1970s Loaded and metronomic beats in the lineage of drummer Moe Tucker.
- John Cale of the Velvet Underground sits on the album cover alongside Martin Scorsese and designer Marc Jacobs, with the reviewer reading the trio as Charli's embrace of prolific, iconoclastic creators.
- The album closes with a monologue from director David Cronenberg preaching that long-term legacy can't be the artist's concern — what matters is what you do in this lifetime.
- Standout tracks "SS26," "Card Declined," and "Yeah" earn praise: "SS26" for gliding doomscrolling malaise, "Card Declined" for capturing shopping futility, and "Yeah" for distilling the creative process almost entirely in sound.
- The same reviewer previously faulted Charli's post-Brat follow-ups — a remix album, a soundtrack album, movie roles, and marketing stunts — as quantity beating quality, a critique the new album's "more is more" ethos directly confronts.
Why it matters: Charli XCX's pivot toward the Velvet Underground reframes her from pop confection into an avant-garde provocateur, but the reviewer finds the album's wordier tracks fall flat — suggesting her prolific, self-aware output risks drowning its best ideas in a content landscape already saturated past the point of easy classic-making.
