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There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore
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Music — Chal Ravens
“Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer. Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta.
Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date.
Most of the new album gets an airing, starting with mission statement single Rock Music – a hard pivot away from Brat’s all-night rave energy and an ode to Charli’s on-stage urge to self-destruct: “I’m really banging my head / I’m really hurting my neck / The nerve damage is real.” Backed by a live band (with guitar, bass and drums played by the kind of underfed, skinny-trousered men who ruled these stages circa 2006) Charli rattles through Yeah, her pocket-sized take on Song 2, and shopaholic reckoning Card Declined, during which she’s joined by a huge cast of dancer-slash-models prowling a three-storey scaffolding set.
Her rotation of outfits is another daring homage to the late ‘00s – glittery blazer over push-up bra and fishnets; ripped T-shirt dress with low-slung belt – and the mood board is tightly curated, with video screens stuck on the same monochrome palette as every outfit and image from this era, including the album’s black-and-white cover, featuring three totemic males of music, fashion and film: John Cale (whose disembodied voice heralds a tense rendition of their claustrophobic duet, House), Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. Pretentious? Just a bit. But Nietzsche, I reckon, would have got on board with it – Charli’s current pop era is basically a cosmic battle between her ego and her vulnerabilities, all watched over by serious Big Dick Energy.
Charli’s crowd are less debauched than her “365 party girl” reputation suggests, but they save their energy for a speed run of Brat’s biggest hits, including Von Dutch and girly smut fest Guess, where knickers fall from the sky like elasticated manna. There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore – like the young man next to me who saw the Brat tour 24 times – with Track 10, a shirt-tearing favourite from 2017’s Pop 2.
The end of the show circles back to new songs, including the hilariously arch “B side” Playboy Bunny, sung on one note like a coquettish Joey Ramone: “All my music sounds the same / Well, that’s because I made it”. There’s a set from Fontaines D.C. still to come, but Charli makes it tricky for the headliners to follow her closing flourish on Nothing Lasts Forever, a morbid reflection on “the crushing highs and lows of ego”, which fades out with director David Cronenberg’s voice on a loop, reminding us of the fate of even the greatest artists – “They are dead, they are gone / Nothing lasts for ever” – as Charli and her dancers stand rigid, staring into the distance. No stage banter, no compromise – just an absolute commitment to the bit.
Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Chal Ravens. Published 29 Aug 2026, 08:23 am.
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