Charli

“Charli” is the best of both worlds: It’s innovative and adventurous but not off-puttingly weird; it finds her fine-tuning her pop instincts without getting overly gushy. It’s one of the most intelligent and sophisticated pop albums of the past decade, a merging of Hollywood sheen and European experimentation that — musically, anyway — is on a par with classics of that genre like Robyn’s self-titled 2005 album, Lady Gaga’s “The Fame” and Swift’s “1989.”

Charli is no doubt an album of too many features and too many parts, but it somehow all fits together in a way that allows her penchant for unconventional songwriting and her ear for an exciting melody to work in concert, creating a project better than most anything she’s done in the past.

Charli is a more-than-worthy follow-up to arguably the decade’s best pop release.

The good news is that her songwriting is stronger than ever. Along with co-executive producer A.G. Cook, Charli XCX has put together a delightful album of high-end pop confections. Charli packs in plenty of wow and proves to be more than worth the wait.

It’s a party album, which means it’s utopian. It’s a solo album, which means it’s rebooting. “Next Level Charli” doesn’t sound like a version we’ve never heard before; it sounds like the very same, not even accelerated but integrated, at 100% synchronization rate.

Charli, her third official album, finally hits a noisy, sweet spot. It is, hands down, the best iteration of XCX yet, the one where Aitchison’s pop capabilities line up most persuasively with her avant garde ear.

Despite the disparate styles and messages, there's a seamlessness to the record that can only be credited to Aitchison and frequent collaborator and executive producer A.G. Cook's deft songwriting and production. They've created an Event Pop Record with purpose, pointing the way forward while positioning Aitchison as a pop artist with something to say.

Mostly, the tech-fetishism, pop hooks, and idiosyncratic heart work together, with Charli functioning as much as expert curator and cheerleader as main attraction.

The result is a collection of sad bops masquerading as bangers, just as perfect for the club as for a solo bedroom dance party. Like much of pop music, Charli’s lyrics favor broad strokes over more specific narratives, leaving her songs open to interpretation.

Here she balances world-straddling confidence with unprecedented exposure of the anxieties and self-destruction that stymie her relationships, turning her from pop powerhouse to empathetic protagonist.

Bold, brash and brilliant, this is Charli XCX at her most genuine, and it’s dazzling.

The artwork for Charli XCX’s third studio album finds her clad only in a steely squiggle of computer-generated ribbon. It’s a great visual metaphor for a collection of 15 pop songs that – at their most thrilling – wear their raw, metallic beats and synths on the outside, like scaffolding.

The sexy android cover and star-studded collaborations (including alternative icons Lizzo, Haim and Christine and the Queens) on her third album, Charli, suggest an all-guns-blazing pitch for blockbuster status. But the contents are far weirder than that implies. ... Come the century's end, you can almost imagine future critics scratching their AI-augmented brains and still touting Charli XCX as the next big thing.

Charli uncovers a singer-songwriter unafraid to display the cracks in her facade, crafting a striking portrait of what happens when a robot glitches.

With Charli, she attempts to capture the spontaneity of those releases [Number 1 Angel and Pop 2] in a more polished format; more often than not, she succeeds.

It’s still a worthwhile successor to them, of course. It’s just not the world-beater she’s surely capable of.

The second half of the record doesn't match the immediacy of the first, with tracks like "Official" and "February 2017" feeling out of place in the grand scheme of the record. Despite these brief lulls, Charli is another winning release from an artist who won't be stopped in pushing pop music into the 22nd century.

Charli is not the perfect pop album, nor is it a fully developed manifesto for where pop could go, but it is a collection of enjoyable, interesting tracks that don’t sound completely alien, but also don’t sound like anyone involved is selling out.

Charli is almost there. Ultimately she’s too gloriously messy and multitudinous to produce such a thing. Although she could often benefit from an editor, her process and vision doesn’t adhere to the music industry’s prioritisation of the album format – which feels right for an artist whose music could be read as an attempt to dissolve time itself.

It often feels as if Aitchison's nasal croon and counter-intuitive toplines are the least interesting bits of her own project. [Nov 2019, p.116]