When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

Nothing’s gonna save us not music fashion or film

Spring Summer 26

When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

I know

Cigarettes

Put them out

Can’t believe the things I’ve done

I don’t do them now

But I didn’t do it

Even if I did

No it’s not my fault

I wasn’t there

Think my politics could work as a press strategy

And my heritage could give me quite the USP

Can’t hide the fact I’d rather take the easy road

Yeah I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes

Spring Summer 26

When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

Nothing’s gonna save us not music fashion or film

Spring Summer 26

When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

I know

I was hacked

It was taken out of context obviously

But I didn’t do it

Even if I did

Wrote a really good notes app apology

Think my politics could work as a press strategy

And my heritage could give me quite the USP

Can’t hide the fact I’d rather take the easy road

Yeah I think I’ll be alright if I look good in the clothes

Spring Summer 26

When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

Nothing’s gonna save us not music fashion or film

Spring Summer 26

When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it

Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell

I know

In the summer of 2023 I wrote a song called ‘360’ which ended up on my 6th studio album ‘brat’. At the end of each chorus I sing the line “I’m everywhere, I’m so Julia” in reference to actress, artist and muse to Josh Safdie amongst others, Julia Fox. I always loved this line firstly because it plays into the focus on internet culture which perseveres not only throughout this song and album but throughout my entire career and secondly because in a way it’s oxymoronic. Whilst Julia is undoubtably famous, she is inherently tied to elements of the underground. Although she is often seen and recognized and out, her approach to fame and celebrity are nuanced and avant garde and sometimes brutally honest in a way that is particularly distinct and not the norm. So yes, she’s everywhere, but she’s everywhere for a certain crowd. She is not Target or Amazon or Mcdonalds, but she could quite possibly be your favorite reference baby, even if you don’t realize it. But if Julia Fox did have a custom Mcdonald’s meal and a clothing line with Target and little Julia drones were delivering everyone’s Amazon packages, would this mass exposure make Julia Fox uncool? I honestly don’t think so because I’m sure she’d find a Warholian way to make it all make sense.

I have always rejected the idea that art, film, persona or music becoming commercial means it cannot also be considered cool. The rejection of commerciality ‘just because’ is such a boring and immature argument that is perhaps more suited to some mediums than others but in general I find to be elitist in a way that does not thrill me whatsoever. Disliking something purely because of its widespread popularity or links to commercialism comes with a distinctly art school type energy that is super triggering to me. This is probably because I was absolutely ridiculed during my first crit as a student at the Slade School Of Fine Art when I stuck 10 drawings of neon colored ponies riding dynamite sticks to the wall using blu tack and then stood back and did that thing of trying to let the work ‘speak for itself’. Most of my fellow class mates laughed and threw deliberately reference heavy seemingly high brow questions at me to which I basically had no answers for. Most except for my friend Matt Copson who told me afterwards that he quite enjoyed the whole experience. I’d argue he’s probably one of the more successful artists to come out of my years at the school. Real recognize real I guess.

My fascination with the combination of high and low has always been a big driver within my work. People who are interested in things deemed as high brow or high art or left of centre seem to feel that undercutting art with something low brow or mass produced degrades the work and people who are more interested in things deemed as low art or popular or utilizing a directness in language seem to find the acknowledgement of theory or history as pretentious. I enjoy the in-between space that this creates. There’s definitely something antagonistic about it and whilst I like that my work can sometimes lead to these sorts of conversations and yes, sometimes shock tactics are funny to me and bring me joy, the integrity of the initial work always has to come first for me to be truly interested in the work itself. If creating something does not come from a truthful and meaningful place within the artist, if it doesn’t in ways wear it’s heart on it’s sleeve, then in my opinion the work is totally fucking DOA.

The apex of cool and commercial has always been interesting to me and I have always mused over the point at which something cool dies and is rejected by the initial group of people who made it desirable and aspirational in the first place. Before I go too much into that let me just state that of course I would much rather be considered ‘cool’ by a select few group of people than known by everyone. And yes, I know it’s inherently lame to care about that kind of stuff, but I’m just being honest. My penchant for ‘coolness’ probably points to my deep routed insecurity (or perhaps I’d even go as far as calling it a fear) of being boring. To be boring is to die right there on the spot. Give up, give in, go home, stay home, end it all. Boredom is something I dread to feel and dread to inflict on others and therefore I guess that means I equate “coolness” to being fascinating and interesting 24/7. A 365 party girl was born.

A few years ago I went to see a friend of a friend’s band perform in London. The show was fine, sold out, the crowd were relatively engaged but at the same time something was missing. I went home and felt weirdly depressed after the show. The next day I called up A. G. Cook to express how I was feeling and as we spoke on the phone I began to realize that I felt depressed because what I had witnessed had felt really safe, really nothing and honestly kind of boring. He laughed and I think found it funny that I was so bothered by the feeling the show had left me with and we discussed why this was. I said “There was no spark! No magic! No distinction! But people were still enjoying it and I don’t judge them for that!”. That last part was obviously not true, I was TOTALLY judging them to be honest. What we watched was technically ‘good’ don’t get me wrong. It was functional and running smoothly but there was just absolutely no style. The audience watching didn’t feel like they belonged to a community that was unbelievably important to them, there was no sense of rabid fandom, it was just people standing and watching and bopping along. They were present but equally not really there at all. It felt like they’d decided to pop to the show on a whim and check it out. The whole thing was one big shrug with a huge air of indifference. Everyone felt unaffected. Everything felt vague. It was not cool.

Watching this show was a pivotal moment for me in terms of the way I thought about coolness. This show taught me that coolness is something I value, because without it everything sort of feels random and nondescript. The second you apply a ‘something for everyone’ approach to art in an attempt to deliberately appeal to more people that, in my opinion, is the moment that coolness dies. That is the death of cool.

However on the flip side I find that when something that starts off as specific and niche and a true expression of a person then becomes popular, it still has the potential to suffer a death of it’s initial cool but not because of popularity alone, more because of the things that sometimes happen en route to popularity. I feel like I experienced this first hand with ‘brat’. After releasing the album into the world, in ways the narrative was no longer in my control. Sometimes that was fun and exciting but other times I would find that people would boil the ethos of the album down to something that just wasn’t anything to do with it at all. It began a game of he said she said. Other people’s interpretations began to become fact, brands began to adopt a visual aesthetic that was clearly tapping into the album’s aesthetic but each time would get it slightly wrong, slightly off. The more time passed from the album release the more and more bastardized the representations of the album became. These representations were replicated and reproduced and deemed as truthful. This is when I feel that things become broad, things become passé, things become boring.

But you know what who knows, maybe I need to face the boredom and sit in the silence? Maybe I’m trying too hard? Maybe I’m moving too fast? Confusion is sometimes cool anyways and maybe its cooler to have a Salvador Dali fake than a Salvador Dali original? I remember in the middle of the brat album cycle one of the vinyl plants accidentally printed 10,000 copies of the album using the wrong hex code resulting in a load of albums in the wrong shade of green. That in itself felt inherently brat, a bastardized version of the album born from a mistake, but kind of a good one. Maybe if you spin it in the right kind of way with the right kind of confidence and a baseline level of taste anything can be cool? Maybe cool can live forever?

One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun. You get to go to great parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and scream out of the sunroof and all that cliche shit. At these parties you sometimes get to meet interesting people and those interesting people often actually want to meet you. You get to wear fabulous clothes and shoes and jewelry that sometimes comes with its own security guard who trails you around the party making sure you don’t lose the extortionate earrings sitting on your lobes or let some random person you’ve just met in the bathroom try on the necklace around your neck that is equivalent to the heart of the ocean. You get good free shit like phones and laptops and vinyl and trips and shroom gummies and headphones and clothes and sometimes even an electric bike that will sit in your garage untouched for the best part of 5 years. You get to enter restaurants through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and the waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat away doing an actual real service industry job while you strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is. You also get to hear a lot of incredible music that undoubtably is going to shift culture and public perception months before its released (the time Addison played me Diet Pepsi for the first time while driving around New York after dinner at Casino springs to mind). Sometimes you get to help out your other pop star friends by providing an opinion or lending an ear or a helping make a decision relating to their work which allows you to feel a part of a interconnected community of people you love and respect. You also get to have fans and their dedication to your work makes you feel like they will be there for you until the end of time, even though in reality they won’t. You get to stand on stage and feel like a God. You get to make people cry with happiness, you soundtrack their break ups, their recovery, their crazy nights out, their revenge, their love, their lives. You get to travel the world and see all kinds of different places and you never even have to worry about booking a single element of the travel yourself because you have an amazing tour manager to do that for you. You get to call in sick whenever you want and you never have to worry about bailing on work last minute because you know for certain that there’s another pop star out there who’s actually way more unreliable and flakey than you. Thank God.

You will also end up spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces. Whether its the holding area of the event you’re about to enter, the airport lounge, the visa office, the claustrophobic tour bus, the greenroom with no windows, the underneath of a stage or the set build of a photoshoot or music video you’re on, you are often caught in the in-between. You’re in transit, you’re going somewhere but the journey itself takes up the majority of the experience. When Rachel Sennott came to shoot her scene in our upcoming film The Moment she was overnighted in a van straight from the front row of the Balenciaga show in Paris to the back doors of a warehouse in London’s Docklands. She was bundled up with blankets and pillows and shipped directly to us like a package. The journey took all night but she was only on set for around an hour.

Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid. I’ve always been completely fascinated by this and think it has something to do with self projection. Being a pop star has always been partially about being a fantasy and obviously the fantasy is decided mostly by the consumer. Marketing and strategy and packaging and presentation can do it’s best to guide a viewer to the desired outcome but at the end of the day the consumer gets to decide whether a pop star is a symbol of sex, or anarchy or intelligence or whatever else they wish to see. Sometimes people don’t like to be lumped in with general consensus, they like to go against the grain of public opinion and that’s when a totally opposite defiant stance is born. Instead of “she’s a sex symbol” it becomes “she’s a whore”. Instead of “she’s anarchic” it's “she’s a fucking drug addict”. Instead of “she’s intelligent” it’s “she’s pretentious and said a whole load of nothing” and so on and so on. I find that this is often where the stupidity narrative can be born. I’ve always wondered why someone else’s success triggers such rage and anger in certain people and I think it probably all boils down to the fact that the patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all. We are still trained to hate women, to hate ourselves and to be angry at women if they step out of the neat little box that public perception has put them in. I think subconsciously people still believe there is only room for women to be a certain type of way and once they claim to be one way they better not DARE grow or change or morph into something else. Also people obviously want the clicks and an opposite stance is more likely to get that. When I joined substack there were a flurry of think pieces and questions as to why. Some people theorized on the desire for long form content and a deeper connection with a fanbase, some people were just purely excited, some people suggested I might be heeding the advice of my record label in attempt to be omnipresent across all platforms, some people were surprised I even had enough brain cells left to write because of all that partying I do (!). The truth is I’ve always loved writing so why the fuck not? I felt generally welcomed to the community but also did see the small wave of people being annoyed I’d broken down the walls of my box they were determined to keep me in, the box, or should I say the brand, of the party girl who smokes cigs, does coke, loves the color green and has the capacity for nothing else. To them I’m a silly little idiot because that’s what they desire me to be. I guess sometimes that’s just part of the deal.

Sometimes being a pop star can be really embarrassing, especially when you’re around old friends of family members who have known you since before you could talk. The discrepancy in lifestyles becomes more and more drastic the more successful and paranoid you become. As a British person the longer you stay in LA the more you lose touch with the realities of certain things, but that’s why being a pop star can also be seriously humbling too, especially when your old friends mock and ridicule you for caring about something absolutely pointless. In ways being a pop star makes me think about the person I used to be compared to the person I am now. How is that person different? Or is she still the same? A couple of weeks ago Yung Lean came for dinner at my house and we were discussing some industry adjacent friends of ours and whether we felt they had changed after their successes in their certain fields. The next day my brain was stewing and so I text him to ask him whether he thought I had changed. I knew he would be honest because he always is and I know he sees through everything, all the persona and all the facade. He is probably one of the wisest people I know. I’m sat there waiting for his response and the three speech bubble dots kept appearing and disappearing on my phone screen which was sending me into a total spiral. When he finally pressed send his message said that he thought I had not changed from the person he knew when we were younger and that he didn’t think I would in the future but also that I definitely do have ‘yes people’ around me that blow smoke up my ass. I said I could see the truth in that but luckily he went on to say that generally speaking I’m too British and self deprecating to actually believe any of the wild compliments the ‘yes people’ might pay me so I was probably safe.

My final thought on being a pop star is that there is a level of expectation for you to be entirely truthful all the time. Over recent years some people seem to have developed a connection between fame and moral responsibility that I’ve never really understood. All my favorite artists are absolutely not role models nor would I want them to be, but maybe that’s just me. I want hedonism, danger and a sense of anti establishment to come along with my artists because when I was younger I wanted to escape through them. I don’t care if they tell the truth or lie or play a character or adopt a persona or fabricate entire scenarios and worlds. To me that’s the point, that’s the drama, that’s the fun, that’s the FANTASY.

I’m ending the essay with a link to one of my favorite Lou Reed interviews. Is it performance? Is it truth? Is it lies? Who fucking cares? In my opinion it’s just funny and cool.

Feeling creativity in abundance is such a fucking blessing and relief. It doesn’t even matter if the ideas are good or not, it just feels euphoric to feel the fountain flowing again. After my previous album, brat, I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore. When I vocalized this, George said “Yeah, but you always feel this way. We all do.” And he’s right, we do, but it felt so potent this time, sort of like being hit by a truck and left on the side of the road to bleed out.

I find when there’s such an influx of joy and passion and vitality in creating an album (the songs, the visual language, the packaging, the live show, the performance of the whole thing) there is naturally a feeling of emptiness that follows once it’s out in the world. Perhaps the giving birth analogy applies but I’ve never done that so I wouldn’t really know. In my mind you get pregnant, you grow the baby, you carry the baby, you give birth to the baby, people want to meet the baby and then you have to spend your time keeping the baby alive and caring for it eternally. But what if birthing the baby in part makes you lose your uniquely intimate connection to it and therefore changes your purpose slightly? What if you don’t want your entire life to be about one damn baby? Obviously to most people a baby is not the same as an album, but to me it kind of is. Creating art is my one true love that I will never desert and no matter how rough things get, I’ll always be there standing by its side. Clearly I’m not ready to be a mother.

What I’m basically saying is that when a body of work that I have nurtured and cared for is thrust out into the world, the umbilical chord is cut and naturally everyone begins to project the work onto themselves. The meaning is morphed, personalized and applied to each individuals’ own life - as it should be! That’s obviously the point. I’m not saying this negatively more just factually. My purpose and involvement in the work itself is suddenly altered. It is less ‘mine’ and more ‘everyones’. When this moment happens I normally go searching elsewhere for fulfillment. But with brat, my latest baby, people seemed to care about her more than usual. So I stuck with her and watched her grow. It was fun, don’t get me wrong, I reached new highs and new lows and both were equally important. But by the end of the process I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior. I still love her, don’t get me wrong but I was itching to move on and was simultaneously frustrated that I was so depleted that I couldn’t. I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way. I couldn’t really even listen to music without feeling depressed. Everything felt monotonous and boring, even if it wasn’t.

In early December 2024 I got a text from an unknown number that turned out to be Emerald Fennell. We had previously shared the same glam team and had met once at a party in a house by the Chateau Marmont but other than that our paths hadn’t really crossed. The text felt out of the blue but obviously intriguing. I had heard through the grapevine that she was making an adaptation of Wuthering Heights and so when she sent me the script to read I devoured it instantly. I was in London at the time, it was freezing and miserable and getting dark at around 4pm, which felt fitting. I began to sink into this reimagined world of Wuthering Heights and I suddenly began to feel… inspired. I was immersing myself in a story that was not my own, a story that was steeped in history, a story that had existed since 1847 (tysm Emily Brontë). I was purely a voyeur and I was enjoying being one. The language of this world felt so opposite from the world I had been inhabiting for the past 2 and a half years. I began to feel a sense of freedom again.

I called Emerald and asked her what she was hoping for from my read of the script. She coyly suggested “A song?” and I suggested “An album?” because why not? I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar. Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living. I was fucking IN.

As some of you may know I’m currently feeling more inspired by film than I am by music. Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating. I’m enjoying acting, I’m enjoying writing, I’m enjoying watching and I’m above all enjoying discovering a new craft. Those things feel really enriching and instinctual to me at the moment but also music is a limb I will probably never fully be able to cut from my body despite trying quite hard to do so at points. When Emerald approached me with an open mind and a total willingness for me to explore I thought… ok I can do something cool here. I can write songs from a different perspective and I can think about these songs as purely serving the film they’ve been written for. For me that’s a totally different approach and finding a new approach always feels like a lifeline to a new way of creating. This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli xcx album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out. All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now and that I feel passionate about what I’ve created and how it’s been created. I also know that I’m enjoying talking about the work here in long form. When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points. I’m writing through the lens of the screenplay I read and only occasionally checking in with my own internal narratives. Most likely it’s not something I will tour. I’d just like the songs to live as songs, within and adjacent to the film.

I made this album mostly with Finn Keane. From the very start of our process we were discussing the Todd Hayne’s documentary about The Velvet Underground and in particular this one quote from John Cale where he describes that the main sonic rule of creating songs for the band was that all things had to be both “elegant and brutal”. We started to live by this description as we created songs for the Wuthering Heights album throughout most of this year. Finn came with me on tour and we rented a studio space most days. During one recording session in Austin the seeds of House were born. At first we weren’t really sure what the song was. We kind of put it in a drawer and didn’t look at it for a while. But then, in August we reopened the drawer while we were working at our friends’ studio in LA and that’s when something clicked for me. I was like “We need John Cale” and to be honest in that moment I wasn’t confident we’d get him. After searching around for a while we did manage to eventually connect. Another unknown number, another serge of creativity. John called, I answered, we spoke and I felt inspired. I offered the idea of a reciting a poem and he went away to think about it and a few days later he sent something back. Finn and I listened. We went through a variety of different emotions before landing on: ok, this is brilliant. I wanted opposite, I wanted other and I had found what I was looking for. To be on a song with one of my heroes is quite frankly completely magical and totally unexpected - running on the spot in a dream kinda vibes. I’m happy to stay here for a while.

If you’re still here reading all this, thank you. I don’t often talk about my work in this way but with these songs it just felt right.