Charli xcx Knows a Brat Sequel Would Be Surrender
The follow-up to a culture-eating album is the hardest assignment in pop. Brat debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in 2024, her highest debut on the albums chart, then took home Grammys for Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Recording Package. From there, every path looks like a trap. Repeat yourself and the magic curdles into formula. Swerve and the new fans cry betrayal. On Friday, July 24, Charli xcx hands in her answer: Music, Fashion, Film, her seventh studio album, built on refusing the contest with her own past entirely.
Look at what she has actually shown us. Eleven tracks and no committee: "It's just me and A. G. Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing," she told Rolling Stone. The three releases already out are titled "Rock Music", "SS26" and "Wink Wink", and she has spent the rollout swatting down the obvious conclusion, insisting she never once said she was making a rock album. The tracklist she unveiled on Instagram runs ten songs at brisk pop length, most around two minutes, then hands the finale to its only featured guest: David Cronenberg, the body-horror director, who closes the album on "No One Lasts Forever", at 5:42 its longest song.
The skeptic's case writes itself: pretentious self-sabotage, the calculated obscurity of a star who is scared to compete with her own peak. A single called "Rock Music" on an album she says was never a rock album. A finale handed to a film director instead of a pop star. You can read every one of those choices as armor. We think that reading gets the stakes backwards. A Brat 2 would have been the real capitulation, an admission that the moment mattered more than the musician, and pop history is a graveyard of artists who chased their own echo. Charli, for her part, rejects the whole framing.
What we cannot tell you is whether the songs hold. Three short singles are not eleven tracks, and nobody arguing about this record online has heard the rest of it. So argue about the strategy, which is public, and the strategy is sound. The one genuine wildcard is that Cronenberg feature. A five-and-a-half-minute finale called "No One Lasts Forever", voiced by the man who made The Fly, is either the year's best album sign-off or its most elaborate art prank. There may be no third option.
Friday settles it. Until then, the smartest thing about Music, Fashion, Film is that its maker understood the assignment was unwinnable and changed the assignment.
