Travels with Charli
by Leila Brillson
This year, last month, the video for Charli xcx “Chains of Love” appears, a prepromotion for the new Emerald Fennell version of Wuthering Heights. The top comment on YouTube reads, “We used to pray for budgets like these…”
In the video, Charli is pulled by an invisible force that flings her and her immaculate hair extensions across a long, glistening dining table, empty but for two tall candelabras, though soon knives, crockery and glass come flying past her from some unseen location. The song swells with the aggression of heartbreak. It’s cinematic. It pairs nicely with last week’s release from the same film soundtrack, “House”, a discordant gothic hymn in collaboration with John fucking Cale.
It’s the kind of followup that may well leave the teenyboppers who spent their spring doing the Apple dance a bit confused. After the massive success of brat gave us a summer that lasted a whole year, Charli is able to unshackle herself from the obsessions of stardom, something she had been just outside of the periphery of for well over a decade. Charli’s in her auteur era. “I think subconsciously people still believe there is only room for women to be a certain type of way…” she writes in her recently launched Substack. “And once they claim to be one way they better not DARE grow or change or morph into something else.” Tough shit. Her cool girl fantasy has finally become a sensation, slathered in rave-scented lime green and powerful enough to make the world’s biggest pop star jealous.
August, 2024. I am having one of my first evenings out “with the girls” since having my daughter. We are at the Troye Sivan/Charli xcx arena tour. Neither opens for the other; they share the stage, alternating songs on and off. Troye has an immaculately staged performance, replete with hot dancers and costume changes. For her part, Charli is alone on stage, a singular force with none of the arena trappings. No over-the-top wardrobe, just her and her Fidan Novruzova moto boots and a McQueen scarf. She isn’t a choreographed dancer, but she jumps and thrashes like a seasoned club kid. In the era of Taylor Swift and sexless Marvel movies, Charli is all sweat and body. I lose my voice and come home at 1 a.m. I haven’t been out that late since.
Now it is 2022, and the Los Angeles spring is weird and wet. My best friend cc and I are driving around in their Jeep, music all the way up, listening to Crash, Charli’s just-dropped album. It’s her most commercially successful to date, but IMO it's filled with disappointing clubby hits by one of pop music’s most interesting songwriters. Crash is the fifth and final obligation of her record deal with Atlantic, signed when she was just 16, and it shows. (Though successful, Charli’s fanbase was lukewarm on the whole Crash thing. No one wanted Charli xcx doing easy-listening disco.)
“What do you think?” cc asks me.
“Meh. Maybe I am over her. I mean, the world only gives you the ability to write one Pop 2, you know?”
Some month in 2020; the pandemic is in full swing. I am lying face down on the floor of my one bedroom apartment in Los Feliz. I have been doing this for hours. I cannot stop listening to Charli xcx’s mixtape “how i am feeling now”, a hyper pop experiment uniquely suited to throwing a club night solo, in your living room. Charli herself has been DJing on IG Live, releasing tracks as she makes them, taking feedback from fans. It is deeply a product of Covid, with lines like, “I get existential and so strange / I hear no sounds when I'm shouting / I just wanna go to parties / Up high, wanna feel the heat from all the bodies.”
Now comes “Anthems”, a clanky, discordant swell of metallic chaos, crunching and pulsing, a beat dwindling into darkness. Co-produced by 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, the song is a manic banger. The whole album seethes with the mourning of the late nights we all miss.
Keep us breathing fire!
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