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 rewrote the cultural dictionary — "brat" as a political adjective, lime green as the color of a generation, Arial Narrow stretched to its structural limits — Charli XCX is doing the one thing nobody predicted: a hard pivot. Her next album, Music, Fashion, Film, drops July 26, and the era shift is total.
The distancing started with provocation. Charli declared "the dance floor is dead" and promised rock music, then delivered exactly that — a '90s-inflected black-and-white video full of cigarettes, mosh pits, and urban ennui. She followed it with "SS26," a moody existential spiral soundtracked by the line "we're walkin' on a runway that goes straight to hell," and a video that opens with legendary French editor Carine Roitfeld intoning "Fashion won't save us" before models walk off a runway into a black abyss. It was directed by Torso — the fashion-world duo also behind work for Madonna's forthcoming Confessions II — and it is, without question, the anti-Brat.
The Cover Is the Manifesto
Then came the album art: a stark black-and-white group portrait featuring John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. Three white men of a certain age, three undisputed titans of music, fashion, and film respectively. Nothing neon. Nothing narrow-fonted. Nothing ironic, according to Harper's Bazaar. Jacobs can arguably hold brat credentials, and Scorsese's TikTok cameo reputation makes him at least brat-adjacent — but Cale is the tell. The 84-year-old experimental music legend is genuinely obscure to much of Charli's fanbase, or was, until his collaboration on "House" for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack sent the "I think I'm gonna die in this house" chorus into content-creator orbit. His placement on the cover is a signal: she is serious.
Predictably, corners of the internet are already clocking the "random men" — which is precisely why the choice lands. When your last album cover was a meme template within 48 hours, putting three cultural heavyweights on the next one isn't random. It's a syllabus. Charli isn't abandoning fun; she's expanding the frame around it, insisting that the same person who gave us "365" and the Lorde remix of "Girl, so confusing" is also paying dues to Velvet Underground lineage and Scorsese's canon.
The Brat era didn't just set a bar — it became a cultural weather system. Music, Fashion, Film isn't trying to top it; it's trying to outgrow it, and that instinct, more than any single song, is what makes Charli worth watching.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
