Charli XCX Blows Up the Music Doc
In April 2025, I saw the earthly ministry of Charli XCX’s Brat reach its natural apex. It was 7:20pm, the exact moment of sunset at Coachella weekend 2. The enormous main-stage screen started strobing to the beat of the Shygirl remix of “365.” All around me, bumps were bumped and terrifyingly huge shrooms were gobbled. There were so many poppers going around that the desert smelled like a nail salon. A grown woman in a sparkly mesh top near me started sobbing, and a shirtless gay man wearing one of those hydration backpacks paused his pogoing to give her a long hug. Then Charli appeared, posing the question we were all happy to affirm: “You wanna fahkin’ pahh-tee or what?”
Coachella was part of a decisive 2025 victory lap for Charli, which also included a string of headlining arena shows (her first as a solo artist, after 2024’s Sweat tour with Troye Sivan), and a surprise Billboard Hot 100 chart position for “party 4 u,” a pleasantly downbeat song from her pandemic album How I’m Feeling Now. Toward the end of the set, her screen graphics suggested successors and alternatives to Brat Summer—including other recording artists (Lorde Summer, Kali Uchis Summer) but also filmmakers (Cronenberg Summer, Sean Price Williams Summer, Ari Aster Summer). Perhaps the best place for a post-rave comedown, Charli suggested, was one’s local repertory cinema?
That set closer turned out to be the key to Charli’s post-Brat life, which is, perhaps unexpectedly, shaking out to be a life of the mind: since her tour wrapped up, Charli has started a Substack, is providing the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s saucy-looking upcoming film adaptation of Gothic literature classic Wuthering Heights, and just dipped a toe in the auteur waters by starring in a self-conceived mockumentary about the Brat phenomenon called The Moment. (Aidan Zamiri, The Moment’s director and co-writer, was also suggested as a potential summer theme back at Coachella.) The party girls have left the discotheque and are standing at the doors of the humanities department—Brat is going brainy. But why?
It’s an unusual move for a pop star to cap off a musical career peak by, uh, starting a blog, but Charli is not a usual woman. Her Substack, launched in November of last year, pulls back the curtain on pop stardom in a stream-of-consciousness style. Her writing blends insider hauteur (she loves blasting cigs in chauffeured SUVs; she got to listen to Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” months before any of us plebes) with vulnerability (she feels relieved that she’s been able to tap into a renewed sense of creativity, because she “had this feeling that [she] wouldn’t be able to make music anymore” after Brat) in a way that feels quite reminiscent of her music itself. After all, Brat was a confessional album about anxiety, grief, and insecurity that managed to still bang at the club.
Charli’s Substack feels very much in line with her other creative ventures, and publishing such ramblingly casual missives feels like her way of claiming auteurdom through authenticity. That’s an important trick to pull off for an artist who sprinkles her social media feeds with that mortal enemy to authenticity commonly known as the brand deal; a recent IG post from Charli shows the singer in a bikini and fur coat, hoisting a champagne flute, thanking Airbnb for her Sundance accommodations.
There’s a key nugget in her Substack essay “The realities of being a pop star” that might help explain Charli’s current mindset. “Another thing about being a pop star is that you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid,” she writes. She plays it cool (“I guess sometimes that’s just part of the deal”) but she’s clearly bothered enough by the prospect of being perceived as “a silly little idiot” to write about it at length. I’m fascinated by her naked desire to not be seen as stupid, a desire whose inversion is, of course, the desire to be seen as smart—intelligence is not necessarily something we expect from our biggest pop stars!
