Charli XCX released her seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, today, July 24. It's 11 tracks, just under 30 minutes, produced with longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane — no major pop guest features, just filmmaker David Cronenberg delivering a spoken-word monologue on the closer. The album arrives after Brat (2024), which made Charli a genuine pop star: arena tours, a viral dance trend, and a Kamala Harris campaign moment. Music, Fashion, Film doesn't sound like Brat. Where Brat had gleaming club anthems, this album has distorted guitars, processed vocals, and songs that refuse to drop. The lead single opens: "I think the dance floor is dead / So now we're making rock music." Early reviews split hard. The Guardian gave it 100 out of 100. The Telegraph gave it 40.

1. The Pivot Works (The Guardian, Rolling Stone, AP Music, Line of Best Fit)

The critics who love it say refusing to repeat Brat is exactly what makes this good.

Abandoning Brat was the only honest move. Charli told Rolling Stone: "I knew when I was making it that I was never going to make that record again. It's not creatively rewarding for me to make the same thing twice." She added: "All of my albums work in opposites. They repel against each other, and that's the connective tissue." That's not spin — it's a documented pattern across seven albums.

This is her sharpest album on identity yet. The Guardian gave it a perfect 100 and called it "Another gorgeously astute and disarmingly deep album about the instability of identity — not just as a vanguard songwriter striving for evolution, but how much we can ever know one another, or even ourselves." That's the album's argument: identity is unstable, and so is the person making the art.

This album is about attitude: making music with people you trust. Rolling Stone's Caryn Ganz (80/100) called it "brilliant, catchy, funny" and described it as establishing "an ethos: hanging around and making stuff with your friends."

The Guardian isn't alone. AP's Maria Sherman (3.5/5) called Charli "one of the current moment's most interesting pop contrarians." Line of Best Fit's Michael Hoffman (9/10): "No longer does she have to prove herself to the industry; here, she's proving herself to herself."

The album is Charli's most emotionally exposed. Charli told fans at a listening event: "I do what I do to fight off my depression and stay alive." ShowbizbyPS's Roman Kamshin called it "the most emotionally exposed album she's ever made" and compared it to "meeting close friends at a dimly lit bar" versus Brat's all-night party.

2. But Critics Who Hate It Have a Real Argument (The Telegraph, Far Out Magazine)

The dissenting camp says the album abandons what made Brat work — emotional directness — without replacing it with anything as strong.

Forty out of 100 from The Telegraph. That's not a minor outlier. It's not a lone contrarian take either — Far Out Magazine titled their review "The Emperor's New Album." Their specific argument: "the implication that listeners simply missed the point fails to address questions about [the album's] objective quality." Even Charli's most ardent fans, they wrote, would struggle to find genuine insight in certain lyrics beyond avoiding pop clichés.

Brat was easy to read. Music, Fashion, Film is hard to read on purpose. Brat was funny, sad, and a genuine emotional document. This album drops the club songs and leans on art-world names instead — a cover featuring Martin Scorsese and John Cale, a spoken-word David Cronenberg closer, songs about making songs. Madonna posted in response to "I think the dance floor is dead": "If your dance floor feels dead / Maybe you're playing the wrong music." Courtney Love called Charli "a troll" — admiringly — but the skeptics would say that proves their point.

Refusing to explain yourself works — but only when the music delivers. Charli told Rolling Stone: "I don't really feel the need to explain my intentions behind anything I do." The skeptics say artists earn that kind of opacity — they don't just declare it. That argument is harder to make when your collaborators are film directors and fashion icons, not musicians.

Where This Lands

The majority of critics are with Charli: the Metacritic score sits at 78 and climbing, and the positive reviewers have specific, substantive arguments about the album's emotional intelligence. But the dissenting minority — Telegraph at 40, Far Out titling its review "The Emperor's New Album" — isn't just reacting against the hype. Their argument is that Brat worked because it was direct, and this album is deliberately indirect. That fight is going to follow the album for a while.

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