After releasing an album filled with music she wouldn’t hearken to, Charli XCX is over enjoying it protected.
“I kinda miss the time when pop music was really volatile and crazy,” Charli, 31, informed The Face in an interview revealed Monday, February 19. “I miss the Paris Hilton days. Everybody is so worried about everything right now, how they’re perceived if this art they’ve created is going to offend anyone. It limits creative output to think like that. I’m also just into this idea of lying all the time. Being really truthful, but also lying. F—k it!”
Charli can be being sincere about her final album, 2022’s Crash. Her fifth album was Charli’s try to make a commercially viable document, per The Face. Whereas it was a average success each commercially and critically, she doesn’t wish to put out any extra “vanilla palatable flatness” into the pop world.
“There were songs on Crash that I would never listen to,” she says, citing her tune “Yuck” for instance. “I needed to switch after Crash — I wasn’t born to do radio liners,” she stated. “That’s not who I am at all.”
Charli defined what will probably be on her subsequent album (its working title is XCX6). There will probably be “irresistible club-pop made by a dyed-in-the-wool party girl,” with music so “brazen” that it’ll demolish Crash. “[I’m] over this idea of metaphor and beauty in art — I just want directness from me,” she informed The Face. “I want things to feel quick and fast and dirty.”
The subsequent album will probably be Charli’s “most aggressive and confrontational” document, including that she’s ready for folks to “think I’m a bitch, but I’m not that.” The Face additionally notes that XCX6 may have a tune a couple of strained relationship she has with an unnamed feminine artist, which is able to possible trigger a response on-line.
On prime of that, XCX6 may also discover society’s “fascination with mean girls” and why “succubus-looking, dead-eyed women” like herself are coded as imply.
“I get tired of behaving in a way that people expect me, or expect pop stars, to behave. I’m not a role model — and I never did this because I wanted to be,” she stated, including that she understands that it “comes with the territory” of being well-known. As a substitute, Charli goals to be a task mannequin for “a very flawed, genuinely real, non-perfect person.”
Charli’s subsequent album may also discover her grief over SOPHIE, the Scottish music producer who died after an unintended fall in January 2021. Charli devoted Crash to SOPHIE and informed The Face that although the late hyperpop pioneer “believed in me in ways that I didn’t believe [in] myself,” she felt distant from SOPHIE “because I was in awe of her and wanted to impress her.”
“I didn’t feel like I was magical enough for this unbelievably magic person,” she stated. “And that makes me ashamed now I don’t have the opportunity to experience that anymore because she’s gone.”