Daniela Parada, Charli xcx’s personal assistant, leads me through a set of double doors into a cavernous warehouse space. The first thing I see is a hulking black edifice—a mass of black cages formed into a giant pyramid, topped with a gigantic woofer. She leads me over piles of tangled black cables and into the structure itself, a rabbit warren of quick-change rooms and production desks, until we finally get to the second-highest layer, below the woofer, which requires a small lift to access. I feel dizzy looking down into the warehouse, which is dotted with dozens of computer monitors and mixing desks. “It’ll be bigger on Friday,” Daniela tells me absent-mindedly. “It’ll be like, 10 feet taller.”

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I’m sweating a little, both from the height and because it’s 100 degrees in Nashville. We’re in an airplane-hangar-like space called Rock Nashville, a state-of-the-art complex where most country stars and some pop stars come to rehearse arena and stadium shows with full production. Charli and her team are here preparing for her biggest performance to date: A headline slot at Lollapalooza for 100,000 people, a week after the release of her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film.

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The show, which precedes the Music, Fashion, Film arena tour, is also Charli’s largest production, complete with a live band, 20 dancers, and enough pyro to burn down Music Row. The performance is both stark and sobering—thanks to the emotional quality of Music, Fashion, Film, and the show’s centerpiece, a nerve-frying performance of “House,” from Charli’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack—and at times, as is de rigueur for Charli, a total rager. But it’s a lot more poised than the put-the-club-in-an-arena dictat of the Brat shows.

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“This show is a lot more filmic, I suppose,” Charli tells me later, smoking a Capri as the sun sets. It reads as her most considered show, which, like the album, taps into the existential nature of making art. “I think I was responding to the caricature of what certain people saw me as after [Brat,]” she says of the album’s shift in tone. (A stream of models filters past us into a series of sprinter vans. “Quite fab, right?” she says offhandedly. “It’s sort of like a school trip.”) “There are personality traits that become identifiable with an artist after they do something that people connect with, and those things are all true, but artists, like all humans, are multifaceted beings. I was like, ‘It’s funny that those things-partying and drugs and sunglasses-are what people think of me.’”

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After teetering over the edge of the stage and imagining, for the briefest moment, my own death, Daniela leads me back down to the warehouse floor and onto a couch on a riser at the back of the room, facing the pyramid. We chit-chat about her life for a while-born in Essex, raised near Brighton, moved to Houston around 11, hence her weirdly non-rhotic accent-before “Card Declined,” a droning highlight from Music, Fashion, Film, starts playing through the PAs. I look over to the stage and see Charli, diminutive in a shredded beige top and black pants, strutting back and forth down what will, on Friday, become a catwalk, flanked by her model-slash-dancers. They perform a bit of the track before pausing, and Charli turns to Imogene Strauss, her creative director, and Eric Christison, her choreographer. “It’s feeling good… I’m gonna make some tweaks,” she says.

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Charli has been in Nashville for a few days, but Strauss, Christison and the rest of the production team have been here for nearly two weeks, finessing the show. Sam Pringle-also born in Essex, one of Charli’s childhood-friends-slash-managers-strides in wearing beige pants and a blue shirt and looks up at the pyramid. Pringle is mischievous and boyish, with a lisp that accentuates both traits. “It looks like we’ve blown the budget,” he exclaims, as Charli and the dancers reset to rehearse “Guess.” Giant jumbotrons on each side of the room show Charli lying on the floor, facing the camera between a dancer’s high-heeled feet. (The dancer’s ankle is bleeding, and a plaster has smeared blood across her foot, which Pringle relays to Charli during a water break. “Do we know who?” she asks. Christison says he’ll find out. “Tell her she doesn’t have to do the full run-through if she doesn’t want to.”)

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Twiggy Rowley—Charli’s other childhood-friend-slash-manager, a quiet, no-nonsense-seeming yin to Pringle’s puckish, flamboyant yang—quickly talks me through the team that’s buzzing around on the floor. Many of them have been in the fold for a long time—she appends a lot of names with notes like “he played drums at Charli’s first show” and “he drove Charli to her early shows.” I say that the operation seems to get bigger and bigger every year, and she smiles. “And hopefully better.” This time around, there’s 110 crew, around 15 buses, and, if she’s remembering correctly, up to 27 trucks, she says. “But we’re trying to get that down.”

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After a few hours of choreo touch-ups, it’s nearly time for a full run-through. Strauss asks Charli if she’s ready. “I just want five minutes to stare into the abyss,” she says, before slinking away to her dressing room. Strauss—smiling wryly in a giant headset and white tank top that reads “Princess”—tells me the run-through will include full pyro for my benefit. (In the past five years, after she started working with Charli, Strauss has become the creative director you call if you want to Level Up, visually: She also works with Addison Rae, Robyn, and Role Model. Her close work with lighting designer Jonny Kingsbury, who’s also present, has dramatically improved the look of large-scale shows.)

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Pringle jumps up to take a call, and Daniela laughs. “Did you watch The Moment?” she asks me, referring to the mockumentary Charli released earlier this year, satirizing the Brat summer phenomenon. “Sometimes it’s like… so real. Like, Sam even talks like Jamie [Demetriou, who plays his analogue in the film] sometimes.” I ask who she is in The Moment. “Ana, the assistant, played by Trew Mullen. Obviously.” Daniela, 27, has been Charli’s assistant for about four years. If you were to try to visualize what someone in that role might look like, you’d end up approximating her: Long dark hair, wide eyes, Bottega bag slung over one shoulder, silver Cartier Santos on the wrist, a vice-like grip on her iPhone.

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The lights go down as the full run-through starts. My eyes water from all the fire and strobe lights. It is the most impressive show Charli has ever done, even with snags—Charli can’t adjust her mic stand, and it’ll have to be changed for each section of the show depending on how high her heel is. Later, sitting on a yoga mat in her dressing room, surrounded by her team, a Diptyque Figuier candle burning on the table next to a pack of Monopoly Deal cards, Charli gives detailed notes on what went wrong and what needs to change. She needs a cue for a couple of songs—her musical director, Mitch Schneider, takes notes of where—and needs to learn the words for “Dying For You,” a track from Wuthering Heights. The outfit during that whole section looks a bit… “Clowny,” says Chris Horan, her small, sweet-natured stylist. He’ll fix it.

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Charli massages her right forearm as she looks at the setlist. “‘SS26… I couldn’t make the mic stand, so I decided to just stop at the edge of the stage,” she says. “That’s fine,” replies Strauss. It feels like you’re leading into what the models are doing, Christison says. There are still some transitions that need work; Strauss and Christison will work those out tonight before the final run-through tomorrow morning. In 20 minutes, Charli will start fittings. She gets up and walks over to me. “Want a cigarette?”

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“It’s kind of nice to go straight into rehearsing a record, because sometimes there’s that thing of releasing an album and then you’re like, ‘What do I do now?’” she says, sitting on a bench outside the entrance to the studio. “The day after it came out, I flew here and just locked in. It’s like, momentum—you’re actually kind of feeding more into the album and bringing a different part of it to life immediately. It doesn’t just… linger.”

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This album, she says, has “tied a lot of things together for me, and shown how different parts of different records can work in tandem.” She’s playing “Pink Diamond,” the aggressive opening track of 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now, on this tour; its chaotic, messy performance is one of the show’s highlights. “I think there are a lot of parallels with this album and How I’m Feeling Now, and that link has made me think about the links through all of my songs, and…” she drifts off. “It’s just like, a constant mining of the self, really, isn’t it?” (“Sorry, I’m really talking in abstracts because I’m so fucking exhausted,” she says at one point. “I can’t get like, a real sentence out.”)

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Pringle gently tells Charli she has to go back inside for fittings, and I call a car back to my hotel, where a country singer will undoubtedly be sat in the lobby playing “Choosin’ Texas.” As I walk to the car, I hear Strauss tell Christison: “It’s really gonna be hard to go back to playing amphitheatres after this. With other artists.”

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Tuesday - Nashville

Tuesday is my day off. I buy a perfume from The Green Ray, a shop in East Nashville owned by Rebecca Moon Cullum, whose husband plays pedal steel on “Choosin’ Texas,” and try on a ripped-up Eagles shirt at a vintage store nearby. I text Charli, asking (only slightly facetiously) if she wants to come see Pavement at the Ryman, to which she politely replies: “ooffff just wrapped rehearsal - might be a bit of a lay horizontal and heal kind of night… but enjoy !!!!”

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Although this is a luxurious form of touring—a Soho House bed every night, a Diptyque candle in every room—it’s also unfathomably demanding. (On “Rock Music,” the opening track of Music, Fashion, Film, Charli alludes to the nerve damage she’s suffered as a result of throwing herself around onstage every night.) The night before, I had asked if she’s ever felt burnt out from a relentless two years in which she’s released four albums and a film—in addition to all the acting roles she’s been taking on lately, in projects like Pete Ohs’ Erupcja and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex.

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“Oh my god, I’m burning out, like, all the time, are you kidding? That’s like, part of it,” she said. “The stillness makes me go a bit crazy, so I think that is why there’s always this quest for doing something else, you know? But I would like to actually try my best to stay in one place for a little bit, be in my house, be with my dog, all of those domestic things that have sort of taken a backseat over the past couple of years. It would probably be quite healing for my brain, and definitely my body.”

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The choreography, I had assumed, was a way to avoid having as many sections of the show that involve Charli flinging herself around—I discover on Friday that she was just saving herself for the real show—but it’s actually because she wanted to expand on the “SS26” video, set on a series of fashion runways. “I’ve always enjoyed hearing music in that fashion setting,” she said. “It makes the music feel really confident to me when I’ve watched shows that are very directional like that—that was more why the choreo happened.”

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The show is still demanding, in other words. “I mean, look—even when we did a run-through yesterday, we just did a run-through today, I’m like, ‘Oh, my body is really sore,’ and that’s why I always have such an admiration for people who go on tour for a long time,” she said. “The stamina that it takes is just not something that I particularly care to get. And the monotony—doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t feel alive enough for me.”

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Wednesday - Nashville

In the end, everyone is hungover on Wednesday—Charli put on a screening of Misery at the hotel last night, and cocktails were flowing freely; afterwards, she and a few others bar-hopped downtown until late, meaning that when we congregate at Grimey’s, a large record store in East Nashville in the early afternoon, energy is at a relatively low ebb. Charli is here to do a Q&A; after answering questions about films and her coffee order—black, coffee with milk is “just soup”—she quickly signs piles of records, before we load into cars to go to The Basement East, a small club where Charli is playing a show for Spotify later. Horan slips on his way into the Escalade on account of his leather-soled loafers, hurting his shin; it becomes the day’s trending topic.

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Hanging around with Charli and her team, who are also her friends, can feel a little like being part of a bizarro girls’ trip, populated exclusively by beautiful brunette women. Mekaila Morris, who makes content for Charli’s social media, is almost always filming, either with her phone or an old camcorder; Henry Redcliffe, who Charli has known since he was 13, is perpetually taking photos and editing them on the fly. Everyone playfully bickers and films each other for videos and compares notes on hotels and online shopping purchases and hangover cures. Far from jaded, they all seem positively starry-eyed—thrilled to be in this glamorous, pseudo-grungy world of YSL leathers and endless cigarettes and hazardous strobes.

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Out in the bandroom, I watch Charli recline onstage in a black dress, yawning intermittently, as Redcliffe takes photos of her in front of the Spotify logo; Daniela is beside me, studying the menu of specialty cocktails for the event. Are you allowed to drink on the job, I ask? “I mean… yeah. If it’s this kind of thing. At MSG [for the 2024 Sweat show] I was getting so killed with organising the guest list that I just couldn’t,” she says. She says she might opt for the non-alcoholic “Film” cocktail tonight. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do this all again… I mean, I’m hungover! I feel like when I woke up I was still drunk.”

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It’s nearly Charli’s stage time; she just needs 10 more minutes, she says, lighting a cig. Yasmin Istanbouli, Charli’s bubbly makeup artist, asks if I’ve eaten any hot chicken while in Nashville, as Morris writes “MUSIC, FASHION, FAMILY” in chalk on the wall. I say no, because I hate eating with my hands, even pizza. Charli is incredulous. “If we went out to dinner and you were eating pizza with a knife and fork I’d think you were gonna kill me,” she deadpans.

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Onstage, Charli debuts a handful of songs from Music, Fashion, Film for the first time with her band—three hot, lanky Hedi boys from LA, obviously. The crowd screams “fucking shoot me!” along with the end of “Camera,” a song from Music, Fashion, Film about the thrill Charli feels when she’s acting, a new pursuit she’s dedicated herself to over the past few years. I’m watching from the sound desk, where Strauss, the creative director, is operating the smoke machine. At the end of “Pink Diamond,” she turns to Pringle and flashes devil horns at him, grinning.

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Backstage after the show, Charli sits on a piano stool smoking a cigarette as Horan, Istanbouli, Morris and Daniela play 2010s EDM songs off a phone. Daniela throws merch from the show around the room, and Charli passes hers to Horan to refashion; within seconds, he’s snipped and tied it into something cooler and slouchier, while singing along to “The Middle” by Zedd and Maren Morris. Charli tries it on and looks in the mirror, before pointing at the Spotify logo in the center of the shirt and making a face. “Calvin next! Calvin!” she exclaims, as someone brings trays of margaritas into the room. “Or ‘Bonkers’!”

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Dizzee Rascal’s “Bonkers” plays, and then David Guetta and Rihanna’s “Who’s That Chick.” Horan, the stylist, films Daniela, flash on, as she sings along, with Istanbouli using her portable fan as a tiny wind machine. Charli laughs from her stool. “Every time we go out it’s like the first time going out—like, there’s all these videos of me last night on the floor of the elevator,” she says. “When I texted you, I actually did plan to stay in, but then… yeah. I tried to leave the bar with two drinks in my bag and they both spilled immediately, so there was like, all this ice in my bag.”

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We watch as Daniela has her Star is Born moment in the corner. “Last night someone came up to her and said ‘You belong in Hollywood’, and she was just like, ‘OK, thanks!’—like, so unbothered,” says Charli, smiling. “Her best friend worked for my manager Brandon [Creed, Charli’s other manager, who also works with Ariana Grande and Troye Sivan,] and recommended her. She’s always going out and getting dinner with the other assistants, it’s cute.”

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Redcliffe hands a laptop to Charli so she can approve the night’s photos; she flicks through while singing along to “Feelin’ Myself,” by Miley Cyrus, before getting up to dance to “She Wolf” by Shakira in the makeshift dancefloor between her friends. As we get up to go to Dino’s, a beloved Nashville dive that they’ve hired out for the evening—where the 2010s DJ sets will continue, and at least a couple of the girls will dance on a table—Daniela pulls me aside: “Hey, I just wanted to confirm that everything from now on is off the record.”

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Thursday - Chicago

In Chicago, Charli needs a bit of space. Tonight, at Lollapalooza, she’ll cameo during Lorde’s set to perform “Girl, So Confusing,” their monumental collaboration from the Brat remix album. I am supposed to properly interview Charli again today, but in the end, things get too crazy—we need to quickly do glam, quickly get some cute photos, quickly work out where we’re standing for the show. Rowley and I hover around Charli’s trailer talking about vitamin supplements; a few years ago, she accidentally gave herself magnesium poisoning. Someone from Lorde’s team approaches to ask how Charli holds her microphone. “She’s right-handed—but likes to be filmed from her left side,” says Strauss, vigorously poking her left cheek.

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I wander around the festival site a little and, in the end, can’t make it back into the artist compound to walk over to front of house with everyone, but I make it through to one of the festival’s artist pens anyway. Halfway through Lorde’s set, Charli walks to front of house, where her husband George Daniel is standing with Creed, eliciting screams from those in the crowd who can see her. She kisses Daniel before being ferried onstage, where she brings the house down.

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It’s strange hearing Charli perform “Girl, So Confusing” right now, if only because there’s something totalizing and levelling about Music, Fashion, Film—like a reset after the hysteria around Brat, which at times felt like it was threatening to swallow Charli, who had spent years cultivating a relationship with an audience that understood what she was going for, whole. That circus, so to speak, gave her a sense of clarity. “I think I more than ever just want to do the things that fulfill me, and I think the longer I do this, that’s all I actually want, hence ‘Camera’ becoming the song that it became. That’s just me talking about the thing I feel passionate about,” she told me on Monday. “That’s sort of my quest for some kind of peace. Will it come? Probably not.”

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Does she want to take legitimate time off from music after this, then? “I feel like whenever I’ve said that in the past, it’s become this real, like, dramatic thing. I mean, yeah, I would, but will I? I don’t know. If an idea comes to me, I’m not gonna be like, ‘Wait, I said I wouldn’t’. But my gut instinct is yes, I would like to take a non-dramatic pause from music—which doesn’t mean retirement or anything like that—and explore some of the other creative projects that are interesting to me,” she said. “I thought I was going to take a break after I did Wuthering Heights, and then it just sort of rolled on because there was an idea that I was inspired by. So if I get inspired, I’m just going to do that thing, whatever that thing is, even if that’s like, ‘Oh, now I want to learn to juggle.’” She laughed and started to mime juggling while singing: “I think I’m gonna die in this…”

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Friday - Chicago

The vibe is still girl’s trip on Friday, but more lowkey. Everyone has a job today: Istanbouli will be sat in the pyramid, ready to provide touch-ups; Daniela is wearing a shiny pass that says ESCORT, so she can make sure backstage access is granted for the many team members from Good World, Creed’s management agency, who have flown in for the show. Charli is feeling good, if a little off. “I feel like this weather”—she gestures to the heavy grey sky above us—“just makes me feel a little… yeah,” she says. “I really want a drink, but I’m scared I’ll stumble or forget a cue or something, because the show is so new.” She asks to go off the record, and we talk about music journalists for a bit, before she saunters back into her glam trailer.

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The atmosphere is excitable but tense: Dancers are stretching and foam rolling; Rowley is flitting between trailers holding a gold No. 1 statue, denoting a No. 1 album for Music, Fashion, Film in the UK, for Charli to take a photo with. Anna Ross, Charli’s excitable publicist, hovers around me nervously. Daniel, the nicest man in showbiz, makes me an Aperol spritz that’s just Aperol and prosecco, and he and I talk for a while with Charlie Barclay Harris, another tour photographer, about Andy Burnham, the new British PM. (He’s not much of a 1975 fan, says Daniel.) Ten minutes before stage time, this phalanx of managers and assistants and collaborators—which, over the course of five days, has swelled to about two dozen—walks as a group to front of house to watch the performance.

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It is probably Charli’s best ever performance, and undoubtedly her most considered: An abstract, assaultive display of creative might that forces the 100,000-strong Lollapalooza crowd into submission. David Cronenberg’s spoken word monologue—specifically, his intonation that “oblivion is freedom”—from the end of Music, Fashion, Film is seeded throughout the show; the whole thing, with its towering 20-foot walls of fire and array of strobes and mob of louche dancers, feels like some lost peak-era Kanye show, alien and deeply human at the same time, the imposing structure some kind of sanctified and deconsecrated monument to artistic expression. All the work of the rehearsals is on full display: The precise hair, makeup and styling; the dialled-in band; the split-second changes in lighting and stage design, like the perfectly timed sparks that blow through the air above Charli during “House.” At the show’s end, she and the dancers create a tableau as Cronenberg’s words flash across the screen: “They are dead/They are gone/No one lasts forever.”

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Afterwards, everyone is reeling, unfathomably thrilled, dazed from how otherworldly it all felt—the way the rain came bucketing down during “House” and “Pink Diamond,” how the crowd seemed so stunned by the show’s surprising, gut-punch final moments. “It’s so massive but so chic,” Daniel tells me. “She’s amazing.” Pringle quickly ferries everyone into cars to go back to Soho House, where there’s going to be an afterparty. Everyone is psyched to the point of seeming stoned; nobody is really saying anything coherent. Pringle turns on the radio, and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” is playing. Its soft tunefulness feels like appropriate cushioning after such an intense show. Pringle turns the music up and everyone in the car sings along.

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At the afterparty—which is also a birthday party for Charli, who turns 34 the next day, complete with a cake in the shape of her stage—she tells me that she was thinking about every move, that it didn’t feel intuitive yet, but that she watched a bit of playback in the moments between the show and the party and liked the way her voice sounded. It didn’t look like that to me. I think about something she had told me on Monday about making the album, which translated, through each movement and sly smile, earlier in the evening. “It’s quite raw, and it’s nice to put something raw on a big stage—it can still feel, in moments, quite intimate, but then other moments it’s a beam of light,” she said. “It’s the instinct thing—it’s always just instinctual. I’m never really searching for the reason why.”

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Please view the original Pitchfork article via the link provided above.

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