Is Charli XCX’s <em>Music, Fashion, Film </em>the Anti-<em>Brat?</em>
The pop star’s follow-up to Brat finally has a release date and a cover—with three unlikely icons
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Charli XCX has officially announced her Brat follow-up, and the title alone tells you everything about the pivot: Music, Fashion, Film, out July 26. After a record that didn't just top charts but rewired the cultural vocabulary — "brat" as political identity, Arial Narrow on neon-lime as the visual shorthand of a generation — the only logical move was to go somewhere completely different. And she has.
The distancing started quietly this past summer, according to Harper's Bazaar. Charli teased a departure from dance music, dropped a deliberately clichéd '90s rock video complete with mosh pits and city-wandering, then followed it with "SS26" — a moody, existential track with a music video directed by fashion-world favorites Torso (the duo also behind work for Madonna's upcoming Confessions II) that opens with legendary French editor Carine Roitfeld intoning, "Fashion won't save us," and closes with models walking straight off a runway into a black void. It is bleak. It is gorgeous. It is very much not Brat.
The Cover Is the Statement
Nothing signals a hard reset like the album artwork. Where Brat's cover was maximalist provocation — color, font, meme-ability baked in — Music, Fashion, Film gives us a stark black-and-white group portrait of John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. Three men, three fields, zero lime green. Jacobs has always had brat DNA. Scorsese earned brat-adjacent status via his daughter's TikToks and a cameo on The Studio. But Cale — 84-year-old Velvet Underground co-founder and avant-garde composer — is the real signal. Yes, some corners of the internet have already clocked the "random men" energy, but that's precisely the point: Charli is doing curriculum now. She already collaborated with Cale on "House" for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, a track whose hook became social media fodder even for listeners who couldn't have named him a year ago. His presence on the cover is a declaration that the party girl and the serious artist have always been the same person.
The genius of this era, even before a single full listen, is how deliberately it reframes what came before. Brat's cultural dominance made Charli a meme, a mood, a marketing template. Music, Fashion, Film insists she is a creative with references — and that those two things were never in conflict.
The album drops July 26, and if the setup is any indication, this summer's defining aesthetic won't be a color. It'll be a conversation.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
