Last week, Charli XCX and the Strokes, twin pillars of a certain strain of disaffected, irony-drenched cool, each released new records that flirt with the idea of “rock music.” In both cases, the deliberate garbling of genre feels like a pointed disavowal: rock music, in particular, has long been preoccupied with notions of authenticity and defiance. In the case of Charli XCX, the smart and funny hyperpop singer whose sixth album, “BRAT,” became a multidimensional cultural phenomenon in 2024, she seems to be attempting to shake off an overdetermined, übercommodified version of herself. On “Rock Music,” the first single from “Music, Fashion, Film,” her new album, and the follow-up to “BRAT” (not counting a soundtrack she released this year, to the Emerald Fennell-directed adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”), Charli sings:
Of course, “Rock Music” is not “rock music” in the traditional sense, though Charli’s vocals are clipped, punkish, and dry, buoyed by a crunch of guitar. (Her sarcastic delivery of the word “wow” contains all the casual but devastating disdain of an angsty preteen.) Stylistically, the song is a twitchy mix of E.D.M. and grunge—more akin to LCD Soundsystem than, say, Pearl Jam. In an Instagram post from May, containing some behind-the-scenes footage of its creation, she wrote, “a video of me making a song called ‘rock music’ that is not actually rock music which is funny because i never said i was making a rock album.” O.K.! One complication of being ultra-chic and eye-roll-y is that, after a while, it becomes impossible for your public to tell which end is up. Or, as John Updike once wrote, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
Mostly, “Music, Fashion, Film” is ad hoc and confessional, undercooked in a way that feels both pleasing and purposeful. It contains just eleven songs and clocks in at around thirty minutes. Lyrically, the album is preoccupied with legacy, perception, and mortality. (The cover features a staid black-and-white portrait of John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese—living titans of music, fashion, and film, respectively.) Its guitars are scuzzy and immediate, and the production, by Charli, A. G. Cook, and Finn Keane, her longtime collaborators, is unpredictable and sometimes surprisingly visceral. “Magic Metal Montana,” one of the album’s best tracks, is a tenderhearted paean to her friendship with Cook: “I’d be nothing without you / I think you taught me, I think I taught you / You believe me, I believe you,” she sings. The softness in her voice is disarming, even through layers of effects.
Charli’s work has always toggled between true vulnerability and hedonistic self-aggrandizement. On the chorus of “360,” a single from “BRAT,” Charli boasts about her ubiquity: “When you’re in the mirror you’re just looking at me / I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia,” she sings, an IYKYK reference to the downtown icon Julia Fox. Yet on “Sympathy is a Knife,” a song purportedly about Taylor Swift, she admitted to feeling goosey, small: “ ’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried / I’m opposite, I’m on the other side.” Swift, who can be terrifyingly vicious with her detractors, seemed to respond a year later with “Actually Romantic,” a weird and petty song co-written with Max Martin and Shellback: “I heard you call me Boring Barbie when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift chirped. Their alleged feud was equal parts funny and mortifying, as it often is when privileged grownups take swings at each other.
In recent years, Charli has adopted a postmodern, almost scholarly interest in fame. It’s hard to say whether she thinks celebrity is more interesting than the work that enables it; at times, her discography has seemed to imply meaning rather than provide it. In a Substack post from this past fall, she linked to a 1974 video of Lou Reed giving an ornery press conference in Sydney, ahead of an Australian tour. Reed wears sunglasses, a lemon-yellow T-shirt, and a popped collar; his hair is short and bleached. He seems to regard the scrum of reporters with a mix of apathy and bafflement. Occasionally, he takes a sip from a glass of juice, using two straws at once. “I don’t have anything to say,” he shrugs, when a journalist pushes him on his terseness. The clip is sometimes recalled as combative, though Reed has the calm but bewildered comportment of someone who has parachuted into a foreign land, and is peering around for the first time. It’s possible that he was on drugs, although, as Charli writes, “Who fucking cares? In my opinion it’s just funny and cool.”
It is funny and cool, though perhaps not just that. The famously idiosyncratic and testy Reed was surely right to eschew spokesperson status. Charli, too, seems to constantly be at odds with her persona. On “No One Lasts Forever,” another new song, she sings:
The end of the song has an appearance from the filmmaker and body-horror auteur David Cronenberg, who recounts a near-death experience he had after collapsing on the street, near his home in Toronto. “As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” Cronenberg says. “I thought about people—I thought about life.” I couldn’t quite tell if Charli included the outro as a rejoinder to her own philosophy, which seems to center art—or, at least, being perceived as an Artist—above all else. Or if perhaps she was trying to tell us that she, too, sees creativity as separate, heightened, and divorced from humanity, yet wholly meaningless without it.
When the Strokes put out their début LP, “Is This It,” in 2001, they were instantly, breathlessly anointed as saviors of New York City’s sagging rock scene. Even back then, they seemed hugely uninterested in that title. (The summer before the record’s release, a journalist from the NME suggested to the front man, Julian Casablancas, that his band might single-handedly revive the genre: “That’s fucking ridiculous,” Casablancas, then twenty-two, replied.) I still love “Is This It,” a punchy album about being young and bratty and terrified and also totally sure of yourself. Since 2001, though, the Strokes have often appeared on the verge of psychic dissolution—shortly before their June tour, the guitarist Nick Valensi announced that he was taking a “temporary break” from the band—and they have yet to make another record quite as pure and potent as that first one.
Yet, in some ways, Casablancas has only become more interesting, both as a vocalist and as an irascible, often controversial front man. “Reality Awaits,” the Strokes’ seventh and strangest album, came out the same day as “Music, Fashion, Film.” It was preceded by two singles, “Going Shopping” and “Falling Out of Love,” both of which caused a mild hubbub for the aggressive use of Auto-Tune on Casablancas’s doe-eyed warble. (“Reality Awaits” was produced by Rick Rubin, who is known simultaneously for his subtractive, Zen-like minimalism and for making things sound compressed and preposterously loud; he does both here.) I surprised myself by eating up the Auto-Tune; much like on Bon Iver’s “715 - CRΣΣKS,” which has Justin Vernon singing through a bespoke pitch-shifting vocal processor known as the Messina, the prismatic splintering of Casablancas’s voice has a kind of surreal, iridescent quality. “More human than human,” as Rob Zombie once sang. Lyrically, Casablancas, like Charli XCX, seesaws between raw sincerity and who-gives-a-fuck insouciance, and his mutant vocals bridge those two modes of being. I laughed out loud at a verse on “Lonely in the Future,” in which a loose and unbothered Casablancas fires off a series of seemingly random potshots, including a dig at Harry Styles, whose “As It Was” uses a beat similar to that of the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain”:
Why not riff on celebrity and the distorting nature of fame in a lightly robotic voice? Casablancas, too, is channelling Lou Reed in Sydney, refusing to soften his crankiness or his illegibility: “I did that yesterday, when I was a kid,” he sings on “Lonely in the Future.” Yet, elsewhere on the record, he sounds beautifully unguarded. “Falling Out of Love” seems to be about what happens after a relationship ends—all the feelings that linger before transforming into something new. “I’m in love with a ghost / I’ll be always and never alone,” he sings. Again like Charli, he is trying to decide what parts of his life are real and spiritually sustainable. On the song’s half-spoken second verse, the Auto-Tune subsides a little, and Casablancas’s tone resembles that of Matt Berninger, of the National—deep, gritty, resigned.
There’s something fundamentally warped about both “Music, Fashion, Film” and “Reality Awaits”—some emptiness or corruption lurking at their centers, threatening to take hold—but it hasn’t prevented me from enjoying the albums. This perhaps speaks to my own degradation, or to the generally rotten state of the world right now. “The worse reality gets, the less you want to hear about it,” Casablancas sings on “Going Shopping.” It’s a finger-wag of a lyric, but of course he’s also right. Each of these records wonders how art can, or should, respond to danger. In the past, rock has done that by being dangerous itself. Here, it seems, the sound of that threat has changed: it’s more about inhabiting and manipulating the machine than about raging against it. ♦