Charli XCX
‘Music, Fashion,Film’
(Atlantic Records)
Released 24 July 2026
CD | Vinyl | DL | Streaming
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
With this cutting-edge album that mixes minimalistic synth blurts, distorted guitar motifs, urgent melodies and minimalistic short, sharp, shock future pop songs, Charli is the true sound of both the moment and of post punk. Not the furrowed brow post punk of the revivalists but closer in spirit to the original form wrestling it away from the earnest geezers and their too perfect record collections and reconnecting it with its playful discombobulation of trad rock.
It would have been easy for her to create a Brat part 2 – a generational album that caught a moment in time with its fuck you pop oozing the kind of attitude that somehow chimed with first wave punk when the charts were brimful of attitude bands armed with the guitar, bass and drums motifs of the time. People often ask when will punk come back – it can’t because it won’t be punk but Charli mirrored its creative FU with Brat and made a version for the then now.
If Brat was her 1977 moment then her soundtrack spirit infused side project with her John Cale aided Wuthering Heights soundtrack was a perfect curveball with neither release giving any cues to the new album which sees her in her own post punk period with these personal songs dealing with love, fame, death and being alive in the 21st century. Lyrics that chime perfectly with the instagram youth and the XCX kidz – the new youth who need their own soundtrack.
Pop at its best is like this – honest, heartfelt, melodic and playful and mould breaking – it floats with its own beauty and melody and the album also takes sonic chances with ghostlike soundscapes, off kilter noise and unexpected joyful bursts of distorted noise.
In 2026 the undergound can be quite tame – a modern Trad Jazz built on tradition and ‘proper music’ with its own innate language and its own safety net. Ironically it takes a top 5 artist to bend music all out of shape in glorious and unexpected ways. A music that creates a new noise whilst connecting with its audience with an emotional intelligence and a savvy sassy street smart. It creates an album that, like its creator, runs amok down the corridors of the pop empire with a perfectly earned confidence in its shape shifting ability.
Pop art? Art pop? Whilst putting the art into artifice? Charli knows, just like Bowie knew, how to make the very essence of pop the art itself.
Not only a giant leap forward from Brat’s zeitgeist but a daring celebration of the possibilities of pop.
This is a music the Velvet Undergound 2026 would have been making.
Charli knows.
John Cale knows.
2026 knows.
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