Charli xcx’s death drive

Charli xcx is having a death summer. Music, Fashion, Film — her first proper album since 2024’s season-defining Brat, and her second if you include her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights from earlier this year — starts with a statement of creative destruction. “I think the dance floor is dead,” she announces on album-opener “Rock Music”, a celebration of hanging out with friends and making art. Maybe you don’t have to take that statement completely seriously. It’s less a manifesto, more a declaration that this record is not going to be a retread of Brat’s ferocious celebration of club culture and “365 party girls”. But the idea of dying recurs again and again in Music, Fashion, Film’s lyrics. Sometimes it’s a kind of figurative suicide: “It makes me wanna throw my life away,