Charli XCX Just Embarrassed Every Pop Star with Her New Album

Charli XCX once said in a Subway Takes interview that art is not important—artistry is. For her, a great artist is more than the song. It is the entire culture and space they inhabit. Music, Fashion, Film, her new album out July 24, is the fullest expression of that philosophy she has ever made.

She did not put herself on the cover. She put John Cale, Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese: one for music, one for fashion, one for film. For a female pop star in 2026, that is a radical act. Women are almost always required to be their own best advertisement. Charli pointed at three icons who shaped her and said: this is what I am made of. It is not modesty. It is context. It is also a reclamation. This album is about paying homage to the things that made her who she is. There is no Charli without music, fashion, and film. She knows it, and she is saying it out loud.

The first single, SS26, is already one of her best songs of the decade. The guitar is moody and slightly apocalyptic, the writing sharper and more politically engaged than anything on Brat. Where Brat was intimate and confessional, confronting her own insecurities and anxieties with disarming honesty, SS26 is broader and more complex. It rumbles with references to capitalism, nihilism, and the absurdity of pursuing cool when the world is burning. She is not prescribing solutions. She is documenting a feeling: the specific vertigo of caring about culture when caring about culture feels both essential and slightly ridiculous.

"You Don't Get Me" continues this: "it's the truth I'm not gonna be honest, I'm not a bad girl anymore I promise"—a self-referential arc that gently undoes some of the Brat mythology while staying completely true to who she is. It feels like an appropriate and necessary successor. She is not getting trapped by her own biggest success, which is itself a masterclass. Going from Brat, one of the biggest albums of the decade, to a rock record with Scorsese on the cover and John Cale as a collaborator—that takes confidence and genuine artistic vision.

Because she is an indie girl at her core and always has been. Her guest performance with Air is the kind of thing that reminds you where she actually comes from. She has been logging fashion documentaries on Letterboxd (Catwalk, Unzipped), and Phantom Thread sits in her top four films, alongside a huge range of references that reveal the depth of her cultural taste. She is not performing interest. She genuinely inhabits this world. That is what she means by artistry over art.

The video for SS26 references the Real Me episode of Sex and the City: models falling into darkness, image culture collapsing inwards. It is visually some of the best work in pop right now. Her presence as a pop star has always been radical—the way she champions the queer community, the trans artists she platforms, and the eras she has moved through without ever losing the thread of who she is. She is niche in the best possible way, and she just keeps getting bigger without becoming less herself.

Summer 2024 was Brat. Summer 2026 is going to be something harder to name, but just as necessary. She's always been a girl. She just keeps getting better at showing us what that means. Now tell us: who would be on your cover?