Paris Fashion Week, October 2025: creative directors are playing musical chairs at the big houses. The military jacket is back and an exhibition honouring Virgil Abloh is spilling queues past the Grand Palais. Staying in adjoining apartments, a stone’s throw from Père Lachaise cemetery, Charli xcx and her tightest collaborators, Alex “AG” Cook and Finn Keane, snatch breakfast together then dart across the city: Charli to sit front row at Saint Laurent and, that same week, to shoot its new campaign, Cook to work on a live soundtrack for McQueen as Keane puts the final touches on Charli’s companion album to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. Friends, including actor Jacob Elordi and model Alex Consani, are in town; the parties spill over into 6am afters in the apartment of a random French philosopher girl. 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.

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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.

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The vulnerability, provocations and pithy hedonistics (“Bumpin’ that”) of Charli’s 2024 club-rat classic turned her from decade-strong underground icon into a towering cultural presence without sacrificing a thing. Brat’s generation-defining incisiveness was best encapsulated by its concluding tracks: the deeply intimate “I Think About It All the Time”, in which Charli wondered about motherhood, straight into the mutant rager “365”, the embodiment of coked-up revelations on a dance floor. Her self-proclaimed “Brat summer” – a mood of thinking less and feeling more – ended up lasting two, thanks to a self-directed roll-out campaign, the signature acid green of which would turn marketeers the world over Pantone 3507C with envy. The record worked at meme level, inspiring bandwagoning from the Kamala Harris campaign, and as deeply theorised high art. Everyone wanted in, and Charli’s creative coterie reflected the breadth of her influence: Brat namechecked friends including Julia Fox and model Gabbriette; Lorde, Ariana Grande and Robyn turned out for the avant-garde remix album; after the track “Apple” seeded a TikTok dance craze, Chappell Roan, Ayo Edebiri and Gracie Abrams cameo’d the moves during the Brat tour.

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Ann Demeulemeester creative director Stefano Gallici – who dressed Charli for the 2025 Met Gala and Grammys – was awed by her worldbuilding. “It resonated with an entire community,” he tells me. “I think we will carry the legacy for a long period.” George Daniel, drummer for The 1975 – and, as of last July, Charli’s husband, says: “It was an incredible time for her and hugely fulfilling, having proved so much to herself.” The runaway phenomenon also boiled Charli down to a caricature – vests, cigs, feckless attitude – which inspired her debut feature film as producer and star, The Moment, released earlier this year. The mockumentary captured the queasy sensation of how mass exposure can destabilise your identity. “Going through this widening of my audience has made me aware of how you can sometimes get made into these bullet points,” says Charli, always coolly analytical. “And that’s not something I’m shocked or even bothered by. Obviously, that happens – it’s cool when you can draw a cartoon of someone in that way.” Her new friend, Coffee and Cigarettes director Jim Jarmusch, likens Charli’s alter ego management to how his old friend Jim Osterberg handles life as Iggy Pop. “She’s really savvy about it,” he says. “I’m sure it’s delicate and overwhelming at times, but she’s pretty solid in understanding the nature of not being the person that is projected.” He witnessed that in action when they were discussing films at a party last year. A photographer asked Charli: “‘Let me get you doing something wild – can you come and snort whisky through a straw out of an ashtray or something?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, all right.’ She does that, then comes back over to me like” – he does a prim English accent – “‘Were we talking about Tarkovsky?’”

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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.

When they dated, they were both at a fork in the road. “And he took one way, and I took the other.” Her path took her through two solo albums; the birth of her daughter with her husband, Tony Stone, a film-maker and a producer; and the setting up of the arts space Basilica Hudson, next door to their home in Hudson. Alongside this memoir, she will also be putting out a photo book and an exhibition from her large trove of photography from the 90s, and she’s working on a musical project. Love has also written a memoir, but first she will be releasing a documentary and a new album, on which Auf der Maur is appearing.

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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”.

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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.”

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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”. And beyond The Moment, Charli has made a serious foray into acting, with nine projects slated. Success in music made her feel “quite spoiled, quite quickly”, she says. “When I was acting for the first time, I was like, ‘Whoa, this is crazy. I have no control.’ It’s really raw. You’re putting your faith in someone entirely.”

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For Charli, life is art. “It’s not like I do it then I take the weekend off to do hobbies or whatever,” she says in a tone that could shutter every macramé club in the country. The lyrics in the forthcoming album examine that relationship – rather than the one she and George enshrined in law recently. Their intimate London wedding last July embodied the Brat ethos – accustomed to last-minute fittings from her pop star life, she only got her Vivienne Westwood dress five days beforehand; the post-reception party at Ellie’s in Dalston (known for its bargain £8 martini) featured trays of cigarettes – while a bigger Sicilian blowout in September (sheer dress by Danielle Frankel) brought out her entire Brat pack, including comedian Rachel Sennott, photographer Petra Collins and playwright Jeremy O Harris. In the same way she makes no distinction between life and art, there are no boundaries when it comes to her fashion choices. On a vintage shopping spree for a Vogue video to accompany this cover story she will say: “I always try and not think, ‘These are my pop star clothes and these are my daily clothes.’ It’s also how I feel about my wedding dress. I’m gonna wear that, like, loads of times. The dress I wore to my afterparty, I literally wear it all the time. I wore it on stage in France with Air first before I got married in it. Why not? My husband rewears his suits all the time.”

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Despite resetting the tone for celeb weddings, 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.”

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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.

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Brat is the sort of record that opens the world at your feet – a transformation for an artist who’s had such a unusual career that her label, Atlantic, and the public, didn’t always quite know how to interpret her. Ultra-prolific, she wrote huge hits for artists including Selena Gomez while also producing radically experimental all-star mix tapes that quickened pop’s pulse. She made the pandemic album, 2020’s extraordinarily raw How I’m Feeling Now, in just six weeks, exposing every shred of her process online, then followed it up with 2022’s Crash, in which she dutifully played the major-label pop star, churning out basic bops with cowriters and performing them with thigh-slapping choreo. It worked, creating her biggest hits, but she hated the whole charade.

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Finally, 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.)

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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In 2007 Charli was 14, obsessed with Paris club crew Ed Banger and making music for the first time. The Hertfordshire teen put her early singles on MySpace and convinced her parents to drive her to perform at Hackney warehouse raves. She signed a five-album deal in 2008, aged 16, but still enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2010. There, her art about Britney Spears and hamburgers was misunderstood, but online, like-minded fans were eating up the goth-tinged tracks that would become her 2013 debut album, True Romance. She quit college, kick-starting her thrillingly wayward career.

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The purity of that era lives on in Charli’s love of making music with friends, something she talks about with such profound gratitude, it seems she’s anxious this could all vanish any second. George theorises that some part of the record is “the idea of really deep and powerful trust” with her collaborators, he says, calling it “a very powerful thing that takes thousands of hours to cultivate”. It’s the rigmarole of putting music out that’s wearying. “Now there’s just so much noise around anything else that I do in a way that I sometimes find a bit pointless. I’m like, ‘Why don’t I just make the album and listen to it with AG and Finn?’ But,” she says dryly, “there’s obviously a narcissism that prevents me from doing that.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Even with a new album due, she talks about film with noticeably more wonder during our evening in the studio. In late 2024, fans busted her secret account on film ratings site Letterboxd, her taste running from French surrealism to Hollywood satire. The projects she’s working on fit that bill: arty, independent, made with auteurs including Gregg Araki and Romain Gavras. But she had never thought about starring in movies until director Daniel Goldhaber suggested she take a small role in his just-released remake of 1978 horror Faces of Death. “I went feeling so like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’” says Charli. “I was like, ‘OK, let me just see how this makes me feel.’ And it made me feel really amazing.”

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Surrendering to Goldhaber’s vision re-juiced Charli’s creative adrenaline. “It can be scary to leave something behind that you’re known for, then risk it all trying to do something else.” The thrill of acting wasn’t that she was instantly great; more that she wasn’t. “I mean, it’s like, so embarrassing,” she says of acting, in a self-aware whisper. “I feel so lucky to be on set with so many actors and directors I admire. I have a hunger to learn and understand how other people do it. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like, ‘Wow, I killed that.’ I feel ready to do it 1,000 times if necessary.”

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When Lady Gaga acts, the credits say “Lady Gaga”, not Stefani Germanotta. For now, Charli’s film work is as “Charli xcx”. “I spoke to a couple of people about whether I should change that,” she says. “I’m on the fence about it. Charli Aitchison is not super-popping though…” It’s hard to think of her as Charlotte. “Oh, I’m never gonna be Charlotte. Come on,” she says, laughing.

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Whatever she goes with, she hopes pop star Charli disappears for directors and viewers: “I want to work with people who aren’t afraid of me because I’m a musician,” she says. The first time she felt like she dissolved into character came when shooting Pete Ohs’s new film Erupcja in Warsaw in between summer festivals and the Brat tour. Her character, Bethany, is dreading her boring boyfriend’s looming proposal, so she gives him the slip to chase oblivion with an old friend. Charli is great, twitching with pity for her drippy partner. “There were definitely moments where I was like, ‘God, I’m not this girl’ and that was really cool,” she says.

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She is still stunned she gets to do all this. Working with Araki, she says, “freaks me out, almost, as I grew up watching his stuff”. A week after we meet, she’s flying to Kyoto to start pre-production with Japanese horror director Takashi Miike on a film that she’s again starring in and producing. First, she’s going back to Los Angeles for a few days. “I’m gonna start prepping for Japan, but I’m gonna be in my home,” she says, stressing the word like it’s a slightly foreign concept. “I wanna step outside to breathe fresh air, but other than that I don’t wanna go anywhere.”

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It takes two weeks to track Charli down again. In between, she wipes her Instagram. The only sign of life is her ultra-active Letterboxd profile. “I’m not as into film as Charli,” says George. “She can watch three films in a night. She might do one or two for research, then we watch one together.” Their rescue dog, Nico, sits with them. “And I’m eating awful sweets,” says George. “Charli isn’t into those.”

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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.

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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.”

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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, fuck 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.”

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We hit time, and she has a novel reason to split: it’s time for her sword-fighting class for the Miike film. “It’s really beautiful and precise, I’ve never done it before,” she says, awed. “I’m really learning, it’s a crash course.” It’s kind of where she’s always been: out on the knife edge, where losing control can become transcendent

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Please view the original Vogue UK article via the link provided above.

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