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.
After a summer that handed us a color, a political moment, a slang term, and a cultural shorthand all in one neon-lime-green package, the question was never whether Charli XCX could follow up Brat — it was whether she even wanted to. The answer, apparently, is a hard pivot. Music, Fashion, Film drops July 26, and based on everything surrounding it, the era shift is deliberate, complete, and not asking for your approval.
The distancing started early. Charli spent the back half of last year loudly declaring "the dance floor is dead" before releasing "Rock Music," a '90s-inflected track shot in grainy black-and-white — cigarettes, mosh pits, cities at night, the whole aesthetic checklist. Then came "SS26," a moody existential spiral whose video opens with legendary French editor Carine Roitfeld intoning "Fashion won't save us" and ends with models walking off a runway into pure darkness. It was directed by Torso, the fashion-world duo David Toro and Solomon Chase, who also helmed work for Madonna's upcoming Confessions II. The dance floor, it turns out, is extremely alive — but Charli is standing somewhere more interesting.
The Cover Is the Statement
Everything you need to know about where Charli is headed lives in the album's cover art: a stark black-and-white group portrait featuring John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. No lime green. No Arial Narrow. No chaos. According to Harper's Bazaar, the image functions as a deliberate closing of the Brat chapter — three men widely recognized as visionaries in their respective worlds of, well, music, fashion, and film. Jacobs is self-explanatory. Scorsese has achieved a kind of meme-adjacent cultural fluency through his daughter's TikToks and a scene-stealing cameo in The Studio. But it's Cale — the 84-year-old experimental musician and Velvet Underground co-founder — who carries the most weight here. His presence isn't decorative. Charli already collaborated with him on "House" for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, a song that found its own life as social media content, but his inclusion on the cover sends a clearer message: she is not here to be a vibe. She is here to be taken seriously.
Some corners of the internet have already clocked the cover as "random men," which is exactly the kind of reaction that makes the choice more interesting, not less. The Brat era gave everyone a word and a color; Music, Fashion, Film is apparently giving them homework.
The smartest thing a pop star at peak cultural saturation can do is refuse to repeat herself — and July 26 is shaping up to be proof of exactly that.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
