‘BRAT’ was a hell of a thing, wasn’t it? Somehow this lime-green gremlin of a record overtook public discourse in 2024, pushing glitch-heavy hyperpop (and Charli xcx herself) firmly into the mainstream. ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is (ignoring her ‘Wuthering Heights’ soundtrack) Aitchison’s follow-up to that true-blue breakout album, and it’s one that ditches the bold colours of ‘BRAT’ for a self-serious monochrome look. The record buried beneath is no less dull.

Charli xcx opens her newest project by saying “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music,” a bold stylistic switch-up to follow your most successful record to date— believe us when we say these songs have more in common with a literal lump of granite than with the genre of rock’n’roll. Lead single ‘Rock Music’ may throw some scratchy electric guitars into the fold, but it remains a track dominated by busy synth loops, programmed drums and heavily-processed vocal recordings: it, like the other nine tracks on offer here, is still a product of electronic pop music, through-and-through. The issue, then, is not that Aitchison is still working in the genre she’s known for, but that her attempts to branch out have sucked the very soul from her work.

These songs may be considered ‘dance’ music in a technical sense, but surely no-one is rushing to bounce around to ‘2007’ or ‘Yeah,’ tiresome and unexciting as they are. ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is a darker and more introspective record than ‘BRAT’ before it, as you’ll no doubt hear in Charli xcx’s monotone vocal delivery, but the songs that make up the album seem unaware of that very fact— each one is still structured around thumping instrumental breaks and sing-along choruses, but what they’re lacking is a sense of drive and energy fuelling them. Aitchison herself asks the question of “do I want to make music?” on ‘Camera,’ and her latest album doesn’t have us fully convinced the answer is yes.

Charli xcx forces us to draw a line between authenticity and laziness, and it’s one she readily steps over time and time again: most of these songs sound more like demos or sketches than finished products, and for more reasons than just one. Tracks like ‘Rock Music’ and ‘Yeah’ fall well-short of the three-minute mark, but you wouldn’t know it from how incessantly they’re forced to repeat their own barebones material— out of these ten tracks, you could count the number of songs that feel fully-formed on one hand. ‘Card Declined,’ complete with its beat-your-head-against-the-wall production and bizarre outro snippet, simply wasn’t ready to see the light of day.

This is, of course, all meant to be in service of a more serious and thoughtful experience from Charli xcx, but even then, there’s far too much irony laced throughout ‘Wink Wink’ and ‘SS26’ to consider this a true tell-all confessional. The few moments of genuine honesty and vulnerability we’re treated to here— namely the apparent emotion of ‘I’m Afraid’ and the poignant exploration of mortality that David Cronenberg delivers on closer ‘No One Lasts Forever’— are appreciated, but they are the outliers rather than the norm. Otherwise, Aitchison’s personal struggles are routinely reduced to nothing more than offhand remarks and jumbled lyrical portraits, delivered without expression or character.

And so, in trying to have her cake and eat it too, Charli xcx has delivered us a dance pop album that makes you want to curl up in the corner: sounds good, doesn't it? The outro of ‘Camera’ sounds like she was making up the lyrics (and their cadence) on the spot in the studio, in a way that feels really quite amateurish and thrown-together: from a production standpoint, too, the drum tones on ‘Persona’ and ‘2007’ are shockingly irritating, in a more insidious way than Aitchison herself seemingly intended. We’ll have to give credit to the light touches of indie rock on ‘SS26’ and ‘Magic Metal Montana,’ which see ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ coming closer than ever before to realising its own identity. The rest, we could do without.

The follow-up to ‘BRAT’ has us making the same face as Martin Scorsese on the album cover, and not because Charli xcx has us deep in emotional turmoil. ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is not just brief, but vapid, throwing half-finished ideas together into this disorienting shambles of a record: it’s not without its relative highlights, but even these are swallowed by Aitchison’s apparent lack of interest in the project as a whole. Maybe she was right after all— maybe the dance floor is dead.