Posted April 8Apr 8 Charli's team have said she's working on a new studio album:intrigued to find out what she does next after two very different sonic worlds in BRAT and Wuthering Heights!
April 15Apr 15 Charli just sent out a voice note and made new posts on her main Insta and b.sides account“hi everyone. i missed you all and i’ve been feeling so inspired. i’ve been making things and i can't wait to share them with you so i will see you soon angels”“i love making things”“me alex and finn in paris @ rue boyer last year. spent 10 days recording here. aidan and alaska came. alex dj'd the mcqueen show. played some songs for some friends at the studio. went to the cinema. had lots of steak frites. felt really inspired.”okay maybe she is coming
April 16Apr 16 Charli XCX is ready for her rock makeover.Between the smudged-eye sunrises, in the studio downstairs from their lodgings, Charli, Cook and Keane are secretly making the pop superstar’s eighth album. One Saturday evening this February: Charli is at another studio, in west London, to reveal her new music. I first see her through the glass, trademark sunglasses on at 8pm, presiding over the sound desk in a Saint Laurent leather jacket: iconography casually assured. I take a seat and she walks to the speakers to plug in her phone, wearing skinny vintage black waxed trousers and Louboutin heels. “We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it,” she says, compulsively playing with her shades. “We knew it would be this very hectic, rich time and we like creating in that kind of atmosphere.” She crouches down, presses play and turns away. Heavily processed guitars strafe the room, then fracture along with Charli’s voice: “I think the dance floor is dead,” she drawls, “so now we’re making rock music.” Clearly we have come to bury Brat.In the studio tonight, Charli is direct, focused, but unusually sincere, far from how she littered her Brat-era interviews with side-eyes and left fans to interpret her potential disses. “xcx8”, as we’re calling the album for now, isn’t yet finished. Charli conveys the steadiness of someone who knows exactly what she needs to hold it together during a febrile period. Even her famed appetite for partying is part of the focus: “Being out in the world at night, experiencing things as I’m writing, is really helpful to my process,” she says.Far from the feckless Brat cartoon, she talks carefully: so deeply in it that the big picture of the album is still coalescing, but also cautious that her new-found status means everything becomes a headline. It would have been easy to capitalise on that by making Brat 2.0. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she says, talking slowly as if imagining the horror. (George says, “Charli sort of broke dance music.”) She really is making rock music, “but what’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be”.She plays a second song; queasy feedback warps beneath a dead-eyed incantation about going shopping for a new personality and falling at the first hurdle: “Card declined,” she deadpans. With sing-songy admiration, Charli admires the song’s “flamboyant and braggy” stance. “It crosses over into how you can dress up who you are and become the ideal fantasy that you want to be in that moment. Everybody is performing, in a way.”The songs feel like knowing assessments of the artificiality of reinvention – the Brat-style cultural reset – but it’s also unusually earnest work for a workaholic who’s always craving new contexts in which to dig deeper into the unknown. “It’s that continuous stripping away and rebuilding, re-evaluating that keeps Charli feeling hungry, excited, driven,” says George. In the studio in Paris, Charli, Cook and Keane would dress up to see “how a ’90s, minimal Ann Demeulemeester cut can make you record a song differently”, she says; it felt less like “a character or a performance”, more “truthful”.Charli says with a guilty laugh, “I don’t really want to write songs about my husband forever. I’m not sure how interesting that is, and he knows that. If I write about our relationship, I’m probably only really interested in writing about some of the more obscure feelings of being married.” The thing she has to express with the new album, she says gently, “is commenting on how I interact with the joint main love of my life outside of George”, namely art. “And what would happen if that was taken from me. How I would have no purpose, and how for good or bad, art does provide me with purpose in my life.”Charli plays a scuffed, sweetly melancholy song about the “quite mad” night at the philosopher girl’s apartment. “Nothing’s gonna last forever / And no one’s gonna last forever,” she repeats. In that moment, she recalled everything feeling “profound and important” – but also temporary. “The song will end and my time doing what I’m doing will end,” she remembers thinking, with a sense of acceptance. “And so I think, because everything is so finite, all I can do is just be true to myself.” The song is also transparently about the Brat phenomenon, something Charli got over quite quickly: she has serious nerve damage in her neck from performing, which has given her “a very traumatic” relationship with the stage. “Often, to get myself to a place where I feel like I’m giving a good performance, I have to feel a lot of angry feelings, which is not pleasant sometimes,” she says. The part of her that craves stimulation was also starved by the Groundhog Day aspect of touring. “I never thought I’d play arenas in my life, and who knows if I will again. Maybe I won’t, but after you’ve done a few, you’re like” – she sighs – “‘Oh, this place.’ It really happens.” Not to more growth-oriented pop stars… “Well, maybe that’s me revealing something I shouldn’t have revealed,” she says, shrugging.Brat gave Charli a defining silhouette for mainstream legibility – masses of billowing, messy hair, nips out, succubus stare – and created a huge appetite for anything she does. But she can’t think about the fact that, for the first time, her new album comes with a built-in audience. “When I made Brat, I made that thinking I was gonna get dropped,” she says emphatically. “I can’t fall down that hole because then I start making decisions that aren’t based in truth and instinct.” For Charli, the spoils of more “traditional” success – she makes ironic air quotes – is how “that does give you some sort of peace to be a little bit more free”. (The new album is coming out on Atlantic, the turmoil long neutralised.)Charli’s model of artistic evolution is the late Lou Reed, another artist easily reduced to a pair of sunglasses and a bad attitude: “He’s not a traditional figure in any way, shape or form.” Charli bonded with Reed’s former Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, 84, after inviting him to appear on “House”, the lead single from Wuthering Heights. “She’s driven by a hunger based on aggressive curiosity,” Cale tells me. “I think we both have an unfaltering commitment to being true to oneself, no matter the cost, no matter who’s buzzing in your ear. Charli is fearless, stands her ground, takes no prisoners and is a real sweetheart. Her mind is made up, her tenacity ferocious.”It might seem quick for Charli to be releasing another album, even a concession to the merciless streaming era. Her friend Gabbriette, the model immortalised in the lyrics of Brat’s “360” – and fiancée to George’s bandmate, The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, says: “Out of all of the things I respect about her, I’m always in awe of how many things she manages to do at once. Sometimes it gives me anxiety, but I’m mainly in awe.”If anything, returning to music was a surprise to Charli. Just last year she was saying music no longer felt “dangerous” to her. “I’ve been making music since I was 14,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s nearly 20 years. I feel very spoiled saying this, but there is not much that can thrill me within music any more.” She plays me the simplest song yet, tough guitar against a sweet vocal chant: “I can take you to heaven like it’s 2007 / Pop star in my bedroom like it’s 2007.” “It’s about how everybody can have their own moment of fabulousness all through their phone in 15 seconds,” says Charli, an avowed Warhol fan. “It’s sort of the ultimate screen test.”Making xcx8 in a fresh setting made music feel alive again: working in a tight unit and preserving a rough demo-like quality to her voice – her trademark Auto-Tune is all but gone – and Cook’s guitar. “We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” she says lovingly, “but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.”At this point, a good number of Charli fans may be screaming: “Guitar? Guitar???” It’s a shock: of all her albums, the one Charli likes least is 2014’s punky Sucker. Her idea of hell is watching a band (apologies to George). Real Music Bores who think guitars are authentic and synthesisers are fake had a field day when Charli headlined Glastonbury 2025, laying into her processed vocals and lack of live band. (She enjoyed the discourse, writing on X: “The best art is divisive and confrontational.”) With his label PC Music, Cook pioneered what became known as hyperpop: proudly synthetic, extreme and famously divisive. Charli started working with Cook’s crew a decade ago, when the futurist haute bubblegum of her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom neutered Sucker’s child’s-play rebellion and catalysed Charli’s bond with her ride-or-die LGBTQ+ fanbase.The new album’s creators are all well aware of the tension that comes with going guitar-centric. Charli sees humour in it, a quality she needs in art. “For me, it’s fun to flip the form. We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine.” The song about the dance floor being dead is going to spark some really boring thinkpieces, though, I tell her. “I know,” she says, grimacing.Last year, accepting the Ivor Novello songwriter of the year award for Brat, Charli said: “I’m sure you all agree, I am hardly Bob Dylan, but one thing I certainly do is commit to the bit.” Her brusque observations mean any reinvention is never a whole-cloth pop star rebirth, but remains intrinsically her. “I’d always rather have a style than be vague,” she says now. “Which is the biggest crime, in my opinion.” The album’s existence embodies that commitment. “It’s looking for this intensity,” Cook says. “It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album.’ She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much. What do you hold onto? I’m inspired by seeing how she’s so ready to do that rather than take it easy.”In early March, Charli finally appears on Zoom one LA morning, unmade-up in a hoodie. She didn’t make it to Japan in the end. “I missed my flight, so I go on Sunday,” she says, her voice gravelly. “It’s been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest.” We talk for a moment about the stress of prepping the Miike film while finishing xcx8. She starts to cry and ends the call. Ten minutes later, she’s back on. “I’m sorry about that,” she says. “I’m overwhelmed and emotional, but I’m ready to go.” She describes herself as “absolutely at capacity”. She isn’t a self-care person, but knows she needs to learn how to be. “My body isn’t handling it very well,” she says, mushing her eyes. “As long as I’m making something, I feel OK,” though her relationship with her work seems as much the beast that feeds as takes away: the perennial Charli paradox.She stresses that the next album – with its insular focus and tight-knit creation – is the reset she needed after the hype around Brat strayed so far beyond the music. “It made me crave something opposite. Getting back to something more internal is really nice,” she says softly, “and really sort of quiet.”The last song she played me in the London studio was the most intimate, about how acting makes her feel “something new and undiscovered and something kinda violent”. It has the sort of beautiful, yearning chorus you could live inside forever. The song’s questions about purpose feel like a new iteration of “I Think About It All the Time”, the aforementioned Brat song about whether to have a baby. Charli’s not currently thinking about becoming a mother; work is where she self-actualises. “I can feel all the things I don’t normally feel,” she sings. What are those feelings? “You’re not thinking one step ahead, or at least I’m not,” she says, picking her nails. “It’s a very impulsive state to be in. That can be terrifying but it can also unlock this instinct in you, and it’s scary but it’s kind of nice, like, f*** it. And maybe I’ll fall on my face and humiliate myself but maybe I’ll do something really powerful, and if you don’t try, you never know.”ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
April 18Apr 18 Author Number 1 Angel ✔Brat ✔Rock ✔her career trajectory basically being this:I gasped at "I think the dancefloor is dead" but ready to inject this pivot into my veins nevertheless
April 18Apr 18 2 minutes ago, Jade said:Number 1 Angel ✔Brat ✔Rock ✔her career trajectory basically being this:I gasped at "I think the dancefloor is dead" but ready to inject this pivot into my veins neverthelessKnowing she's working on a rock album and then hearing the last two minutes of this excites me
