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For more than a year now, I have often returned, when seeking a bar for which to measure true pop transcendence, to the memory of Charli xcx taking the Other Stage at Glastonbury: the unofficial headliner, a year out from her culture-shifting opus Brat, commanded a dizzying 60,000 people with an imperious “don’t fucking play with me” and the stunning brute force of a performer at peak power. It was surreal, as a longtime fan, to witness an artist who was as recently as 2022 playing to cult followings in 2,000-cap venues convert thousands more in real time, to see years of hard-earned pop instincts and artistry collide with the zeitgeist in a career-defining, you-had-to-be-there achievement.
But life goes on, of course, and Charli, like the rest of us who surfed the high of Brat summer 2024, found herself on an inevitable comedown. A lesser artist may have confronted the question of what comes next with blunt commercial logic – more, again – but Charli, a self-professed workaholic and tireless interrogator of one’s own image, proved to be creatively restless, if scattered. A cinephile rebrand, three films at Sundance, an Instagram-dominating celebrity wedding, a defanged satire of her own sudden ubiquity, a windswept soundtrack that more or less saved the otherwise dreadful Wuthering Heights – all suggested a self-aware ambivalence with mainstream success that threatened to corrode all that came after. With the release this July of Music, Fashion, Film, her eighth studio album, I worried that she had succumbed to a seemingly manic drive to stay visible. The album, a deceptively vulnerable and winking pivot to rock that was either self-aggrandizing pastiche or genius, depending on what angle/substance/context you beheld it, did not seem to stand up the scrutiny and over-explanation of relentless celebrity promotion.
But on Tuesday night at the Barclays Center, for the third night of the album’s tour, Charli proved doubters wrong with the most satisfying answer yet to what comes next: a full-volume tribute to pop’s euphoric potential for obliteration that substantiated the album’s most potent themes (the fragility of self, egoism, mortality), a thesis statement of artistic evolution that seamlessly integrated her past and present. After essentially conquering the art of abrasive minimalism with her solo stunting for Brat, Charli has embraced just enough maximalism to freshen up an arena tour – pyrotechnics, backup dancers (in club-ready bras, of course) and most evocatively, a pyramid set composed almost entirely of layered speakers, befitting a pop artist refreshingly in touch with her death drive. Forget toothless escapism – more than any other main pop girl, Charli has embraced the notion that, as David Cronenberg advises in a spoken-word outro blared from the screen, oblivion is freedom. Fitting, then, to strut and writhe and scream at the altar of a giant, smoking amplifier.
Loudness can, in fact, count for a lot. After several festival headline slots this summer proving the new material’s live mettle, the blown-up Music, Fashion, Film tour confirms the album’s caustic yet restorative vision, or at least that the contested MFF opening salvo Rock Music has its time and place. The new songs suddenly make sense when delivered on high by Charli and her band of underfed musicians that would be seen on stages in 2007 (not coincidentally, also the name of the album’s catchiest track), amped up to the max and crackling with live guitars – deliriously searching, itchy and jagged, even if the crowd’s head-banging in response was at best polite.
The bristling arrangements cast the album in a flattering grayscale light, less a pop departure and more an extension of Charli’s longstanding search of catharsis and embrace of contradictions, brash fiendishness by a different name. The transitions from Wuthering Heights track House – a show highlight dripping in strobe-lit distortion – to “surprise” fan-favorite throwback Next Level Charli to new track Dying for You to a relentless five-song Brat mini-show were near seamless, if appropriately deafening from all sides. You can’t really accuse her of riding the contrails of Brat when the tracks – Von Dutch, 365 remix, 360, Sympathy is a Knife among them – still have the propulsion of a jet engine; I may forever hear the echo of gay men, women and apparently children screaming “bumpin’ that” off the Barclays ceiling.
But Charli is far, far savvier than to resort to sandblasting fans into ear-ringing submission; the show keeps just enough of her minimalist bent to suggest a morphing of her club-rat persona, embodying the mesmerizing highs and crushing lows of ego. No CGI visuals, no guests, no stage banter, just a singular vision of persona: one minute she’s strutting down the runway under fashion lights flanked by an army of imitators to the dead-eyed shopaholic requiem Card Declined, the next she’s alone on the floor, then merely a solo silhouette disappearing into fog.
Nothing lasts forever, Cronenberg reminds us in the Music, Fashion, Film song of a similar name – No One Lasts Forever – that serves as both the album and show’s sticky finale. Flanked by dancers, Charli struck and held a pose meant to be captured for posterity, backed by the looping certainty of impermanence – “they are dead, they are gone, nothing lasts forever,” no more explanation needed. There are now, conservatively, 10,000 photos of that final tableau, and 10,000 more from the night before that will live in the iClouds of hardcore and bandwagon fans alike probably forever. But the moment is inevitably, sadly, thrillingly gone.
