Charli XCX’s fiery Outside Lands debut ends in a rumination on death

Darkness had fallen over Outside Lands, and I was standing in a sea of people so tightly packed in it might as well have been prepandemic rush hour on BART. “We’re crowd-surfing and you better lift me!” a girl with sequined eyes told her much taller friend next to her. A distorted melody started to echo through the fog, white lights flashing from the stage, then an eruption of pyrotechnics. Charli XCX emerged, and everyone screamed, raising their phones to capture whatever they couldn’t see with their own eyes. She would go on to deliver one of the best headlining sets in years.

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It’s the British pop sensation’s first time at the music festival, and just under two years since her last stop in San Francisco at Chase Center, when she was touring on the multi-Grammy award winning record “Brat.” The high-energy album of club hits with its companion record of remixes was her most successful by a long shot, becoming less of an arrangement of songs and more of a cultural sensation (see: “brat summer,” and brat was also named the word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary in 2024.) If a lime green look-alike contest at Fridays on Front Street last week was any indication, no one seemed ready to give it up.  

But Charli XCX, who has been making music since she was a 14-year-old Essex club kid and only recently achieved mainstream success, wasn’t here to impress her casual listeners who are only now joining the party. On Friday night, moments after Baltimore hardcore five-piece Turnstile sent the crowd into a tornado of multiple mosh pits, her trademark sunglasses were gone. She was wearing a zippered leather minidress and fishnets, and her hair hung loosely in her face. She stood in front of a mic stand flanked by a guitarist, drummer and bassist equipped with a synthesizer. As her new song “Rock Music” crescendoed over syncopated snippets of scuzzy guitar, she sang a cheeky declaration to kick off her nearly hour-and-a-half-long set: “I think the dance floor is dead.”

Charli XCX’s latest album, “Music, Fashion, Film,” might be what she’d play at the afters, while she’s still chasing an adrenaline high and everyone else has gone home for the night. If “Brat” was about conveying an in-your-face persona and faking it until you make it, “Music, Fashion Film” peels that layer back, instead exploring where the boundary between character ends and true identity begins. There’s a sonic shift, too, with electronic melodies swapped out for live instrumentation.

The concept for the record came to her when she thought she would step away from music for a while, fueling rumors of early retirement as the longtime cinephile pivoted to a new creative output. 

Already the star of the 2021 documentary experiment “Charlie XCX: Alone Together,” she then starred in a mockumentary called “The Moment,” a send-up of her most famous music era with a who’s-who of celebrities ranging from Alexander Skarsgård to Kylie Jenner. She went on to craft the soundtrack for a controversial version of the literary classic “Wuthering Heights” and portrayed an unruffled content moderator in the remake of the ’70s snuff horror film “Faces of Death.” She shape-shifted into a 30-something determined to avoid her boyfriend’s proposal in the anti-romantic comedy “Erupcja,” instead embarking on a three-day partying binge with her long-lost Polish friend, and appeared as the uptight psychiatry student dating Cooper Hoffman’s character in new queer cinema icon Gregg Araki’s most recent film, “I Want Your Sex.” 

She was happy with where her career was going. But then, “Inspiration struck,” she recently told New Zealand DJ Zane Lowe in an interview for Apple Music, so she followed it. “You don’t know whether that might be the last time that it happens,” she said.

A celebratory — and sometimes melancholic — exercise in gratitude for her mentors and creative collaborators that also dares to be a little self-indulgent, “Music, Fashion, Film” feels like the blank check of Charli XCX’s discography: the type of music she’s always wanted to experiment with now that she has the resources to back it up. Sleek and scaled back, it debuted with a simple black-and-white album cover featuring a photograph of director Martin Scorsese, designer Marc Jacobs and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale. It was the first time all three of them had met and was shot in just 15 minutes, she said in a recent BBC interview.

“This a kind of a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” she remembered thinking that day. ”This is probably never going to happen again.”  

Pitchfork named it “Best New Music” with an 8.2 rating immediately after its 9 p.m. release on July 23. Listening events with behind-the-scenes footage ran in a limited number of theaters and sold out at the Piedmont Theater in Oakland within the time it took my friend to text me about it. Vulture called it a piece of art that successfully delivered the anti-brat.

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“This is a pop album that makes you want to think and challenges you to feel,” wrote Stereogum’s Margaret Farrell. “It is existential and silly, sentimental and sincere, ridiculous and devastating. It winks at the Teenagers and Lou Reed and feels like it could soundtrack a Sofia Coppola film.”

A drone hissed from the sky as she raced into “Yeah,” a fuzzy romp of a track about cracking the puzzle of the creative process; it sounds like a Warped Tour-era pop punk song you’d encounter on someone’s MySpace profile in the summer after seventh grade. But she didn’t make the festival crowd wait for long to hear songs from “Brat” either. Those made up about a third of the setlist, complete with impressive choreography, barricade-scaling camera work following her every move, with a cannon of underwear raining over the crowd during her remix of “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish. 

“This is a classic,” she said in one of a rare handful of remarks between songs before breaking into “Apple,” a song about generational trauma with a signature TikTok dance that throngs of people did their best to partake in, bumping elbows. 

It’s these contradictions that Charli XCX seems to live in most comfortably; carefully crafted lyricism within bouncy hit songs that hide a darker undercurrent. In “Wink Wink,” she sings about who she is and the boxes people try to put her in. “Card Declined” (the standout track on “Music, Fashion, Film” for me personally) explores consumerism as a means of escaping oneself, the depression lurking beneath the glamorous lifestyle. “I’ll buy some jewelry, a personality, a whole backstory,” she muses. “Camera,” a song with a music video starring Vincent Cassel, the star of one of her favorite David Cronenberg movies, “The Shrouds,” balances the thrill and vulnerability of becoming a new character onscreen. 

“I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck, I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous,” she sings. “And maybe this is it, maybe it’s what I need, ’cause it’s the only way to feel like I’m not actually me.” 

But it’s the final song of the night and the last song of the album that seems to convey her new era best. “No One Lasts Forever” features clips of a recorded interview she conducted with Cronenberg at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. The body horror auteur known for “The Fly” and “Videodrome,” 83, speaks about a time when he collapsed on the sidewalk in front of his home. She wanted to know what he thought about in what could have been his final moments: Was it his art or his time spent behind the camera? It wasn’t, he told her. It was the people he had met and the formative experiences that meant most to him.

The jarring discussion of mortality makes up the latter half of the song, which traces how fleeting seemingly important aspects of life can be, whether it’s a successful album, a relationship or the people in your life. I waited to watch what happened as the spoken word component of the track took hold and interestingly, a mass exodus of the crowd began.

Maybe they were trying to beat the crush of traffic on the way home, or maybe they just didn’t get it. “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” Cronenberg’s voice echoed. The rest of the audience stayed put, stunned into silence as she stood at the center of the stage, surrounded by backup dancers. Her face was stoic. Cronenberg’s voice eerily repeated over the crowd until everything faded into static.