When diving into Charli XCX's latest multi-medium project, Music, Fashion, Film, it's difficult not to trace its lineage back to 2023. Longtime fans will remember how Charli quietly explored similar sonic territory through Thy Slaughter, the duo comprising Finn Keane and A.G. Cook, whose album Soft Rock served as an early blueprint for this guitar-driven direction. Despite its misleading title, Soft Rock is anything but gentle. Built around heavy basslines, bitcrushed textures, and distorted electronic instrumentation—even across its more acoustic moments—the album creates a dense, experimental soundscape. Its largely obscured female vocals function less as a traditional focal point and more as another layer within the production, blending seamlessly into the duo's maximalist approach. The result was a carefully crafted, sonically rich project that hinted at the possibilities Charli would later explore more directly.

With Keane and Cook once again steering production across Music, Fashion, Film, the creative lineage is undeniable. Yet comparing the two projects initially creates a striking contrast. Where Soft Rock feels meticulously assembled and sonically polished, Music, Fashion, Film embraces a deliberately unfinished texture—sparse, stripped back, and at times resembling a collection of rough demos rather than fully realized recordings.

Knowing the technical precision Finn Keane and A.G. Cook are capable of, however, makes it immediately clear that this "undercooked" quality is anything but accidental.

To understand Music, Fashion, Film, it's worth revisiting Charli's now-viral SubwayTakes interview, where she declared, "Music is not important. Artistry is important." That statement functions almost as the project's mission statement. Judged purely as a conventional album, the music lands somewhere around a 6/10. But reducing it to that misses the point entirely. Music, Fashion, Film asks to be experienced as a unified artistic statement rather than a collection of standalone songs.

The project unfolds as Charli's brutally honest psychological portrait in the aftermath of Brat's overwhelming success. It's a meditation on relevance, creative survival, and the anxiety of confronting one's own legacy in an industry that thrives on constant reinvention. That existential dread culminates in the closing track, "No One Lasts Forever," featuring David Cronenberg, whose title alone reinforces the album's central fear: no one remains at the top forever.

The project's rough, unfinished aesthetic is therefore its thesis. By embracing the texture of rock demos, first takes, and the scrappy spirit of 1970s proto-punk, Charli isn't trying to make a definitive rock record. Instead, she's using rock as a storytelling device. The imperfections become part of the narrative.

Charli's songwriting has never depended on elaborate metaphors. Its strength has always been its startling directness—thoughts presented almost exactly as they occur. That radical transparency serves Music, Fashion, Film perfectly. The blunt lyricism mirrors the emotional exhaustion at the heart of the project, using the abrasive minimalism of rock to document burnout, self-preservation, and the relentless pressure to remain culturally relevant.

As a purely sonic experience, Music, Fashion, Film may leave rock traditionalists wanting something fuller or more technically satisfying. But evaluating it on those terms alone feels incomplete. As an interconnected trinity spanning music, fashion, and film, the project reaches beyond the expectations of a conventional album.

Taken as a comprehensive artistic statement, Music, Fashion, Film earns a light 8/10. Charli xcx once again proves that her greatest strength isn't simply making great records—it's constructing entire conceptual worlds. More than almost any of her contemporaries, she remains an artist whose work becomes richer the deeper you engage with its lore.