Music

Pop firebrand Charli XCX has always had a complicated relationship with the genre she loves. Throughout her career spent on the front lines of pop music, she’s embraced, rejected, satirized and reinvented pop convention in equal measure — often, her relationship with her own art seems as tumultuous as the toxic romances she often writes about.

Her latest album, Crash, builds on everything she’s learned from a decade spent as one of pop’s most devoted acolytes. It’s the last album she’s contractually obligated to produce for the five-record deal she signed at age 16, and it’s clear this arrangement has weighed on her — she’s spoken at length about the exhaustion of manufactured pop stardom, both in her music and on social media.

She’s far from alone in this position; indie-rock giant Mitski also released a deal-closing album this year that dealt openly with the pressures of producing art for profit. Unlike Charli, though, she chose to convey these stories with severity, penning songs marked by contemplative lyricism and stark, doomy production. When Charli sings about the pressures of capitalism, she does with a wink and a smile, bikini on, cheque in hand. Crash spins a sexy, campy story about a pop girl selling her soul to the devil — as usual, she’s in on the joke.

But Crash is more than a self-aware satire about selling out. Through collaborations with genre-defining innovators (Rina Sawayama, Caroline Polachek, Christine and the Queens) and era-defining producers (hyperpop maverick A.G. Cook and Rami Yacoub, the co-producer of …Baby One More Time, among others), she pays homage to several decades of pop evolution. Some tracks, like Sawayana collab Beg For You, emulate the funky pop classics of the early aughts; others use crackling production and hyperpop distortion to write a science-fiction ode to the future. You get the sense, listening to Charli’s music, that her fervour for the pop genre borders on religious — she worships pop, lives and breathes it, embraces it as our collective salvation.

Through it all, she retains a sense of irony and self-awareness that propels the album forward with irresistible inertia. It’s sexy, iconic and relentlessly unserious; some artists might pen a love letter to their genre, but in Crash, Charli writes a sext.