.charli_xcx spoke to RollingStoneUK about her latest album Crash, which tackles heartbreak, sex, and self-destructive tendencies. Read it here:
Charli wears bodysuit by House of Harlot Aitchison herself is against the idea that celebrities should be accessible and “real”, the mode of celebrity culture in the 2010s, crucially in full force while she was navigating the bulk of her pop career.
“I enjoy that early-2000s era of celebrity where Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are just being iconic and being these otherworldly figures,” she says. “It’s the same with musicians, to be honest. I want my favourite musicians to shock and surprise me and annoy me and completely flip my brain. I don’t want to feel safe with the work that they provide me. I want to be constantly kept on my toes and not be able to see what’s coming next from them.” For her, that’s Kanye West, Yung Lean, Tommy Cash and her collaborator Caroline Polachek. “I think that’s what makes a great public figure, celebrity, artist, musician, performer, whatever: to not be able to predict what happens next. That’s the fun of celebrity, I suppose.” “It’s hard for me to not sit on this call with you and destroy everything I’ve built because I’m feeling really reckless. It’s actually really a challenge in self-control, press, at the moment” For Aitchison to enjoy her new album, she had to surprise herself. The insular, fast-paced construction ofinformed its follow-up: “I knew I had to turn it up to high-octane, ten, pop-star level for it to feel fresh for myself.”should have existed first: ‘New Shapes’, ‘Good Ones’, ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Twice’ were written, at least in part, before the previous album began but the pandemic halted it. She knew she wanted to put her own money into this big, impressive pop album and not being able to travel to collaborate with pop producers or put on her biggest tour yet made the entire venture redundant. became her focus. “This album was originally going to be calledand I liked that title because that sentence is both past, present and future,” she says. “You can say that sentence to someone as if you hurt them in the past or as if you’re going to hurt them or if you’re about to do it right there and then.”Control by Janet Jackson and songs by Cameo . Inspiration for her retro bombshell look came from watching live performance videos of Madonna, 80s interior design and movies like!. You can see the research in the campiness of her humping her own gravestone in the video for ‘Good Ones’ or the bouffant hair with deadness between the eyes on the single covers: the visuals are equally indebted to sexploitation films, Elvira and Pat Benatar.conjures up the monumental drama of 80s music: sweeping landscapes, thunderous skies, bold colours and the expanse of a dancefloor half-empty and ready to be met with your misery. This mood is obviously felt in the interpolation tracks, like ‘Beg for You’, which uses September’s 2006 hit ‘Cry for You’, a song which in turn mimicked 80s classic, ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. “It’s become a trend within pop music these days to be very referential of previous hits, which is cool if you’re into nostalgia, less cool if you’re into pure futurism. I feel like there’s a cool middle ground that can be met, which is hopefully what I’m doing,” Aitchison says. It’s also there in the way the 80s references are heightened by her own overwhelming and staggering emotions. Far from adopting the classic tactic of front-loading an album with hits,builds to feature the best run of Charli songs yet, climaxing with stories about lust, love and heartbreak. Her new single ‘Baby’ is “a sex anthem, basically”. The deceptively smart ‘Baby’ knows that with pleasure comes pain: it starts as a promise of lasting carnal satisfaction over a funky, sexy synth track and, with gleeful delight, turns into a vow to break your heart and shred your heart into tiny pieces . “I was feeling myself that day in the studio and that song just makes me feel so sexy and confident and was an important song for the foundation of this album,” she recalls. “I made it with Justin Raisen, a big contributor to my first albumThe following track ‘Lightning’ is a standout dancefloor filler that harnesses the euphoric misery of Robyn’s best known hits. “,” she prays, shortly before being struck down. For this track, she returned to anothercollaborator, Ariel Rechtshaid. ‘Lightning’ is followed by ‘Every Rule’, an oral history of a relationship over an instrumental that could’ve come straight from. It’s a song about her long-term relationship that recently ended, made with A.G. Cook and Oneohtrix Point Never “a long time” prior to. “It’s funny when you talk about explosions, this really genuine and beautiful love story on this album is also quite traumatic to listen back to, because this is a relationship from my past that no longer exists. Even the story within how we met is quite explosive, I suppose. I really love this song because I’m just saying exactly what happened and it feels very truthful.” Other songs deal in relatable ideas like men giving you the ick – doing something that suddenly and irreversibly turns you off – and not knowing whether you’ve blown up a long-term relationship for the right reasons or you’ve self-sabotaged again. Initially, messaging around the album indicated that it was about the destruction of the pop star in a manipulative and damning major label system. Charli XCX was using the spoils of her fifth and final record in her major label deal she signed with Atlantic to make a statement about autonomy and artistic freedom. With its album cover of the singer, bloodied and on the windscreen of a car in a bikini,is an obvious reference to the J.G. Ballard novel of the same name. In the book, former car-crash victims seek sexual thrills from recreating the experience of crashes. In theis an existential book about how“I’d never actually made a major label album in the way that it’s actually done,” Aitchison explains of. “It felt interesting to me to use moments of that process to make this final album as somebody who has really navigated the major label record system since I was 16 in completely on my own terms.” It’s been a challenge for her. Between pitching to streaming platforms, making sure visuals align, waiting for answers to her questions and for drop dates, she has found it painfully slow: “I’m learning about patience and taking things a little bit slower, which is probably why I have so much time to look at the internet now. There’s a lot more promo and talking about yourself which one would think I’d be good at by now but I actually hate it.” Her old cover interviews on previous album campaigns involved meeting a journalist on a night out or going to a spa to drink champagne with them. We are on a 30-minute call. Does she not like press any more or does she perhaps worry too much about being misinterpreted? After a pause, she says, “I really enjoy press when I’m in a good mood or a good headspace. But honestly I feel like, for me, press is kind of a volatile space. I’ve been feeling really self-destructive lately. So it’s hard for me to not sit on this call with you and destroy everything I’ve built because I’m feeling really reckless. It’s actually really a challenge in self-control, press, at the moment.”narrative and art project and how much is Aitchison’s reality, which she is sharing honestly here. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter – a fully formed, larger-than-life pop narrative that keeps people guessing is what Aitchison wants from her favourite artist and she’s giving it to us at the height of her powers. In her 2014cover story, she told the journalist that her end game was people writing about her, to say “just… that I was an important songwriter who changed the landscape of pop music.” Eight years on and she has indisputably done this. To the mind of her collaborator Rina Sawayama, Charli XCX is currently our greatest pop innovator. On a personal level, Charli is “lovely but fearless – that definitely contributes to why she can do what she does and [why] people are drawn to her as a person and artist.” Charli’s trajectory and testing relationship with the industry has given Sawayama ideas about how she wants to navigate her own career. “I think for new artists you should definitely model on Charli’s attitude of not feeling like you have to go down a one-track route. You can do weird, you can do pop, you can do whatever you want.” At the close of our call, Aitchison is concerned that she’s been too negative or that I’ve read her as such and wants it on record that she is animated by“Despite my stubbornness and quite cunty attitude, I am a really positive person and I’m really, really so fucking hyped to get on the tour and the stage and bring this shit to life,” she says. This year, Alexandra Palace will host her biggest London show to date by far. “I used to play shows at Hoxton Bar and Grill with only my mum and dad there, so to think there’ll be thousands and thousands of people watching me sing my songs is crazy and I’m really excited about it.” Now Charli XCX is back in the driver’s seat and indignant and there’s no time to breathe because she seems to have remembered in a flash what she does and more importantly who she is: “–and I really deserve it because I’ve fucking grinded and I work really hard and I always stay true to myself and I feel really passionate about what I’ve done and the things I’ve achieved so I can’t wait to get on a stage and absolutely kill it, basically.” After a significant sigh, there’s a smile in her voice: it might be complicated but it’s Charli, baby. Charli XCX fronts Rolling Stone UK’s digital cover. Subscribe to Rolling Stone UK in print and digital
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