Double Take: Music, Fashion, Film
K Bowman vs. Kerry Ranshaw
Welcome to Double Take, a new series(?) for oppositional takes on the same music. This time, we’re covering the polarizing new Charli XCX project, Music, Fashion, Film. Enjoy! Or don't.
30:07 // July 24, 2026 // Atlantic Records
K’s take:
Before Lizzy Szabo and Glenn McDonald named hyperpop, before liking Skrillex was cool again, before dariacore, digicore, and future bass, “Boom Clap” was on the radio nonstop and PC Music was making its way through the Soundcloud repost circuit. Charlotte Aitchison and the PCM collective had a lot in common, each making music that felt like a reconstructed skeleton of previous trends (primarily ‘00s pop punk in Sucker’s case, regretted chart trends and recession pop for A. G. Cook’s crew). By digging deep, they got to the roots of what makes pop music tick. Retrospectively, it’s no wonder this moment is where they first collaborated. As their paths continued to interweave in the 12 years since, the differences in their styles are smaller than ever. Aitchison, Cook, and Finn Keane1 (fka EASYFUN) perfected ‘10s pop, crystallized it, and shattered it, eventually picking up the best pieces and turning them into brat.
Comparisons between brat and Music, Fashion, Film are inevitable, given the former’s surprise ubiquity, but they have more in common than just their subsequent placement in her discography. The production on each is minimal and refined, simple and clearly very intentional. But where brat had a variety of producers, Cook and Keane are the only ones on MFF, leading to an even sparser and more unique sound, which I can only semi-accurately describe as a combination of the high end of rock and the low end of pop. It’s very reminiscent of Cook and Keane’s 2023 album under their alias Thy Slaughter, Soft Rock, which featured a few Charli XCX credits and much of the messy guitar-synth blurring on MFF. Most obviously, both albums clearly have her most personal lyrics yet, confessing insecurities, hopes, and uncertainties that are unusually transparent for a musician of her status. In the process of getting right to her specific feelings instead of the traditional pop path of painting in as broad of strokes as possible, her music has become much more relatable. Paired with her burst in cultural capital and her vocals shifting further towards spoken word, there’s plenty of fuel for parasocial fans. She’s clearly playing with this phenomenon here, adding many winking and intentionally controversial and messy lines. Fans will debate for years which ones are tongue-in-cheek, but many bystanders are cynically yet reasonably reading everything about it as a cheap PR stunt, an attempt to elongate or jumpstart the success of brat summer once again. They’re probably right to some extent - I’m not here to defend a multi-millionaire using the album rollout as a way to promote overpriced B-side vinyl singles, and her whole convenient flip-flopping between self-aware irony and isolated sincerity is obnoxious even from the perspective of a longtime listener. The music is good enough to make up for this, thankfully, but if that hasn’t happened for you on a first listen, it’s probably not gonna grow on you much. With brat, the appeal was obvious whether you bought into her whole thing or not, but MFF is clearly for the heads. It might even just be for her.
With that perspective in mind, overly charitable or not, MFF really hits. It’s full of perfect moments, like “Yeah”’s sugar-rush of a chorus, the glitching and clicks of “Camera,” and, of course, “ro-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-”. The album progresses from dramatic announcements to dissociation celebrations to anxious friendship, with a loose theme of unending change and even death. You can entirely ignore the lyrics and their obvious connections to Aitchison’s professional and personal life and still recognize that this is a more realistic, bittersweet angle from her. I try to avoid personal asides, but this feels too specifically relevant: in 2015 or so, as a weird and misguided college gag, some friends secretly wrote “DEATH IS INEVITABLE” in large, scrawling handwriting on the back of another friend’s Justin Bieber poster, to surprise them when they took it down. Outside of embarrassment at my 18-year-old self’s bizarre sense of humor, the primary feeling I have of that poster is the exact feeling I get from MFF, and the same one I got from PC Music around that same time. It’s pop culture twisted into something uncomfortable, inspiring questions about finality of life and self, a message that’s extremely blatant under a paper-thin veil of secrecy. Call it disillusionment, introspection, or maybe just the sound of denial snapping as reality sets in - it takes a special kind of art to accurately center those gnawing feelings. The final comparison I’ll make to brat is this: brat ended in the same way it began, creating a perfect album to loop over and over again, but MFF ends by explicitly telling us: “They are dead, they are gone, nothing lasts forever.” It’s a natural step for an artist and her friends who have each been arranging and experimenting with the bones of pop for over a decade now. The world finally caught up with them, and that means it’s over - this is an album about the process of recognizing that. Even as it stumbles along the way, halfheartedly disguising one genre as another, struggling to commit to looking at itself in the face, it holds steady to that one point. Everything changes.
Kerry’s take:
Look, I liked brat just fine, even if I couldn’t call it “perfected ‘10s pop” by any stretch of the imagination. “Von Dutch” stomps like vintage Fall Out Boy underneath all those panicked, blaring synth sirens, “360” has that uber-satisfying sense of momentum to the melody that makes singing along totally irresistible, and “Apple” is a quality dancefloor tune about realizing you’re becoming just like your mother (she’s never satisfied). It’s a good time! For that matter, I think her 2014 breakout album Sucker is a perfectly good pop album too, and I think accounts of Charli’s career that hinge on assertions that her music only “got good” after linking up with PC Music really downplay her own very obvious charisma as a vocalist and talents for hook-writing as somehow unable to stand on their own without wonky futurist production.
These stances put me in a bit of an awkward spot with Music, Fashion, Film, an album completely trapped and defeated by the idea that people will listen to it out of investment in Charlotte Emma Aitchison as a human being. K’s take merits a direct response here: “her most personal lyrics yet” these may indeed be, but were we really ever listening to Charli xcx for her amazing lyrical ability??? Far from being “unusually transparent for a musician of her status”, this mode of venting about the existential pain and hollow rewards of celebrity has been exhaustingly prevalent in mainstream pop since at least My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy— and unlike Kanye West, Charli just does not come across like fame has actually fucked her up all that badly. I do not find these lyrics honest or cathartic or artful in any way, and I certainly don’t find them “relatable”. I’ll agree to disagree on the music, but seriously, what part of this am I meant to emotionally connect to? The line about selling her Porsche? The part where she ponders promoting her music by leveraging her politics (whatever they are— Is Kamala still brat, Charli?)? Hell, even “Rock Music”’s smirky ode to headbanging falls totally flat; her engagement with it is too ironic, too deliberately distanced from any actual experience I’ve had myself with capital-R Rock. “SS26” fares even worse, the worst, most cynical lyrics I’ve had the displeasure of hearing in years. As universal as the feeling that the world is ending and all hope is lost may be, I find Charli’s sullen insistence that Nothing’s gonna save us / Not music, fashion or film to be not just uncompelling but actively offensive. It’s a dereliction of duty for a musician to sneer at the possibility of music saving people like that, even ironically so. Sure, nobody likes a pop star with a messiah complex, but Music, Fashion, Film has so little faith in itself that I’m left feeling like my time was wasted out of sheer spite. It’s self-aware in the most cloying, paralyzed way.
Like I said, though, I really didn’t go into this album expecting soul-stirring poetry. I wanted bangers, and it’s on this front where I’m slightly more willing to hear an argument in favor of Music, Fashion, Film. I was raised on plenty of sugary late-aughts Radio Disney pop-punk, I’m an easy sell for power chords, I see the appeal of a stripped-back album full of crunchy, overproduced guitars. The problem with this argument is simple: the drums sound like shit. They just flat out stink! There’s no power and no drive whatsoever to these songs. On the rare occasion they achieve a glimmer of pop resonance (“2007”, “Persona”) it’s largely thanks to the aforementioned guitars combining with a sufficiently obvious vocal melody, or in “Magic Metal Montana”’s case, thanks to moving at a fast enough clip for the pitifully weak handclap snare to be a trivial issue. Overall, the impression left by these tunes is nearly as sour and pallid as that of the lyrics. I can deal with navel-gazing and a dozen layers of irony if I can still get turnt to it, but sadly, the most damning thing to be said about this album is that it’s just no fun at all.
K’s score: 8/10
Kerry’s score: 3/10
These are the artists Aitchinson has primarily worked with from PC Music, but the work of others like GFOTY, Danny L. Harle, and Kane West are clear and frequently overlooked influences.