Charli XCX
Crash
ATLANTIC
The recent Hulu documentary Charli XCX: Alone Together frames its subject’s album recording sessions as a collaborative process just short of a group project. Charli struggles at points with her isolation, to be sure, but the thrust of the film centers on her joyful communal approach to recording her 2020 album how i’m feeling now, offering slivers of information to her fans, soliciting feedback, and recalibrating accordingly. As Alone Together suggest, Charli’s democratization of her music is an elemental component, key to understanding the passion of her fanbase and the nature of her own creative process.
This thesis has come under strain with the promotional cycle for Crash, Charli’s fifth studio album (and the final release in her record deal with Atlantic), an unusually turbulent period that has sparked a lingering sense that maybe Charli XCX, relatably, spends too much time online. Off-putting fan interactions aside, Charli has recently described Crash as her “sell-out record,” an unabashed embrace of the bubbly center of the pop landscape she’s spent her career operating at the fringes of.
In reality, Crash doesn’t quite validate Charli’s framing or contradict it; these songs are at once very accessible in their pop sensibility and very clearly Charli XCX songs. It’s far from an unambiguous rejection of her strengths. It does feel as if, across the board, her more brazen impulses have been sanded down. Crash finds Charli cherry-picking her favorite pop tropes and refracting them through her own singular lens, but exercising restraint while doing so.
In some respects, it’s the major-label pop record observers expected her to deliver half a decade ago. The restless ’80s-flavored dance of “Baby” is the melody that hits most instantaneously, but similar earworms are all over the place; “Constant Repeat” is propulsive and addictive, while “Yuck” is a smirking subversion of the mushy conventions that often underlie songs just like it. She thankfully avoids the overuse of cameos that burdened 2019’s Charli, but when guests are used (as with “New Shapes,” featuring Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek), they’re utilized wisely. Pre-release rumblings suggested that Crash might be a clear misstep for Charli, but instead it serves as a validation of her instincts. Even as she strays from the formula that has earned her a nearly peerless critical reputation, her pure skill as an architect of pop songs is never in doubt.
