With a 12-date North American arena run, a guitar-driven seventh album dropping July 24, and an album cover featuring Martin Scorsese, Marc Jacobs, and John Cale, Charli xcx isn’t pivoting — she’s evolving on her own terms.
The lime green is gone.
That’s probably the first thing Charli xcx’s fanbase — the Brats, the devotees who turned a last-minute quarantine album into one of the defining cultural events of 2024 — will process when they look at what’s coming next. No neon. No chaos-as-aesthetic. No viral summer of memes and political endorsements and a word that briefly redefined what it meant to be a certain kind of messy, self-aware, thrillingly alive young woman.
Brat was a moment. Charli has always been better than moments.
This week she announced the Music, Fashion, Film Tour — 12 North American arena dates beginning September 11 in Philadelphia — and with it, the clearest picture yet of who she intends to be on the other side of the biggest commercial breakthrough of her career.
The album drops July 24. It’s her seventh studio record. And the first thing anyone paying attention noticed is that the two tracks already released — Rock Music and SS26 — are built around guitars, not the electro-dance architecture that made Brat such an efficient serotonin delivery system. This is not a subtle shift. Charli is telling you something.
She’s been telling you for a while, actually. The album cover, revealed last week, features three figures representing each word of the title: John Cale for Music, Marc Jacobs for Fashion, and Martin Scorsese for Film. That’s a Velvet Underground co-founder, one of American fashion’s most enduring provocateurs, and the director of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, and roughly a dozen other films that changed what cinema was allowed to be. The message embedded in that image is not subtle: this is an artist reaching for a different conversation entirely. Darker references. More permanent ones.
It tracks. Brat was Charli at her most id-forward — impulsive, immediate, designed to be consumed at high speed and shared faster. Music, Fashion, Film sounds, from its title alone, like the album she makes when she’s thinking about legacy rather than the moment. Whether the execution lives up to that ambition is a question July 24 will answer. But the framing is confident to the point of being a little audacious.
The tour itself is lean by arena standards. Twelve dates. Two nights at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center (September 14–15). Two nights at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum (October 17–18). Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, Boston’s TD Garden, Washington D.C.’s Capital One Arena, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, plus stops in San Diego, Glendale, and Las Vegas rounding out the run. Electronic artist Underscores opens every date — a consistent co-sign that signals something about the sonic world Charli is building around the new material, even as the album itself goes guitar-forward.
She’s also hitting the festival circuit this summer before the arena run begins — Lollapalooza in Chicago, Outside Lands in San Francisco, Reading & Leeds in the U.K., and Austin City Limits in October. The festival appearances will serve, functionally, as a testing ground for the new material in front of mixed crowds, the kind of audiences who aren’t necessarily Brats but might become something else before fall.
That audience management question is interesting. Brat turned Charli xcx from a critically beloved cult figure into a genuine mainstream phenomenon, which is a different kind of problem than the one she had before. The pressure after a cultural breakthrough of that scale is almost always to repeat it, to lean into what just worked, to trust the formula. Artists who resist that pressure and follow the work wherever it leads — Radiohead after The Bends, Beyoncé after Lemonade, Kanye after almost everything — tend to either expand their audience’s loyalty or lose some of it. There’s rarely a safe middle path.
Charli has never appeared to be particularly interested in safe paths.
The Brat tour was a spectacle of controlled chaos, the lime-green visual identity so total it became its own cultural language. The Music, Fashion, Film tour will be something different — Charli has stated as much by announcing it without the familiar neon branding, and the show design for the new era presumably reflects whatever the album is reaching toward: something grittier, more cinematic, less immediately legible.
That’s a risk. It’s also, for anyone who’s followed Charli xcx across the full arc of her career — from the teenage songwriter who wrote hits for Iggy Azalea and Selena Gomez before anyone knew her name, through the PC Music era and how i’m feeling now and Crash and the slow, grinding critical redemption arc that Brat finally collapsed into mainstream vindication — it’s the only move that makes sense.
She’s not building a brand. She’s building a body of work.
The fall will tell us how many people are ready to follow her there.
Full Tour Dates — Music, Fashion, Film Tour:
Sept. 11 — Philadelphia, PA — Xfinity Mobile Arena
Sept. 14 — Brooklyn, NY — Barclays Center
Sept. 15 — Brooklyn, NY — Barclays Center
Sept. 21 — Toronto, ON — Scotiabank Arena
Sept. 24 — Boston, MA — TD Garden
Sept. 28 — Washington, D.C. — Capital One Arena
Oct. 6 — Atlanta, GA — State Farm Arena
Oct. 14 — San Diego, CA — Viejas Arena
Oct. 17 — Los Angeles, CA — The Kia Forum
Oct. 18 — Los Angeles, CA — The Kia Forum
Oct. 21 — Glendale, AZ — Desert Diamond Arena
Oct. 23 — Las Vegas, NV — MGM Grand Garden Arena
Underscores opens all dates.
