Two-minute Pop, 30-second Rock

New albums from Charli XCX and YHWH Nailgun

I’m out of my depth writing on pop music, but Charli XCX’s new album Music, Fashion, Film dares us to think about lines drawn around rock. “We were doing our version of analogue,” she told Laura Snapes, quickly qualifying to undercut any portentousness, “…but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.”

“We” and “our” may be the true key words in those pop-wise statements, however. Charli XCX is a band on the latest album: a trio of Charli, A. G. Cook, and Finn Keane, with songwriting credits generally shared by the three (Aitchison/Cook/Keane), and production by the two gents. In the visual version of the album, a “making of” the music and its more formal videos, the three are seen traipsing around between hotels, carrying the instruments and equipment they need to write and record, looking like nothing so much as Young Marble Giants or maybe Saint Etienne on tour. “Why don’t I just make the album and listen to it with AG and Finn?” Charli wondered aloud to Laura Snapes in that same revealing interview. Which is a very indie rock attitude, to be sure. You’re making music with your friends to make music with your friends. The rest is a such a pose, you know?

Charli XCX knows from a pose. She is a wriggly front person, and the making-of visual album is essentially her facing camera and doing her thing through each track.

But in the background we see something else at work in the various settings of Charli’s life in music, fashion, and film. The music part is stripped down: three people in a room with a laptop, an electric guitar, and an excellent vocal mic (Sony C800-G, A.G. Cook is very generous sharing studio techniques). Their work together is intimate in the way it is for a band. There are half-sentences, giggles at ideas, and concentration when the sounds kick in. This intimacy is the subject of lyrics for my favorite track on the album, “Magic Metal Montana,” a love letter of sorts from Charli to A.G. Cook. “You're my best friend, but we don't talk / We make music, we talk that way,” she sings in the verse. And then there’s the lovely half-time chorus, which I’ve had stuck in my head for days:

Oh, you makе it easy for me
Yeah, you makе it easy for me
Yeah, you make it easy
Easy for me

- with shifting emphasis on each repeat of the phrase. “Ragging,” as Tin-Pan Alley songwriters would have called this syncopation which has made popular song what it is ever since the Jazz Age. “Pop” and “rock” do share the same history, after all.

But the making-of video turns up something else entirely for the other two pillars of the album’s title, fashion and film. When Charli XCX is engaged in fashion there is large team of collaborators present. For the track “SS26” (Spring/Summer 2026), we see a visibly fatigued Charli working through what seems like a very, very long session preparing looks and photos and runway moves for a season’s presentation. It is no laughing matter. Everyone there looks tense, tired, at the edge of losing it. And there are a lot of them.

Still, that’s nothing compared to the armies we see in the film segments of the visual album. “Camera,” a brilliant pop single in my amateur evaluation, addresses the thrill Charli feels at being on set despite or because of anxieties provoked by it.

I feel different on the mark
Something new and undiscovered
And something kind of violent
Daring to fail and being ugly
I'm inspired and alive

A singer who loves to pose sharing the anxiety of posing is what makes the song for me, it’s a mise en abyme. Is it a pose about a pose, or is it a pose that isn’t a pose because it’s music not film, for which she doesn’t have to pose (although she does anyway and is great at it)? Add the visual element and you get another set of doublings - not one but two videos for this song about facing the camera, one where Charli does (in the making-of visual album), and an “official” one where she instead plays the director for a professional actor who cannot complete the shot because a very large crew keeps screwing something up.

As in the fashion shoot, life on the film set is portrayed here as extremely tense and crowded. The actor is cranky, there is panic from the crew at mistakes and angry outbursts from the star that synch up with the song for just one phrase which seems to tangle all of Charli’s feelings about the camera together: “Fucking shoot me.”

Music, Fashion, Film are not three equals in the Charli XCX visual album, as they might seem from the literally iconic album cover of a deadpanning John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. Music is something you do relaxed with friends; fashion is tense and tiring; and film looks downright hellish with (real) explosions, (fake) blood and (real) tantrums.

Maybe it’s because Charli XCX has always combined all three of these practices that her work is truly pop, no matter how stripped down and familiar she can make songs for a rock listener like me. I’ve never had a big enough crew or video budget to know first hand the other side of that coin, what happens when aspects of pop enter the world of rock. But I do know what it is to work in a band as it develops a persona in the public eye, especially one that plays and records live each on their own instrument. Here are YHWH Nailgun performing their entire new album, Magazine, and it is really not that distinct from the sound of the record:

YHWH Nailgun, like Charli XCX, have a wriggly front person, which you can’t know from listening on headphones. They also have a superb drummer, which you can tell from recordings because these beats could not possibly be made by machine or loops. As for the rest, it’s a bit of a mystery what is making the sounds: there’s an electric guitar that doesn’t behave like a guitar, a synth that often takes the role of a bass, and swelling, sweeping arrangements between the two that frequently merge. Even watching these two instrumentalists play live it can be hard for me to pick out which of them is responsible for what sound at any given moment.

That confusion of sounds and their source is what I personally think of as typical of pop music, not rock, in its contemporary form. When I hear current pop on the radio, it’s rare that I can picture musicians physically making the sounds, apart from the vocalist. The rest seems very much “in the box,” as studio engineers say: it’s a computer file made with whatever synthetic sounds it can access, which is anything and everything except a human vocalist and a live drummer. It’s not so different texturally than YHWH Nailgun, in other words. Are they making pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop music?

Listening to: Charlie XCX, Music, Fashion, Film

Cooking: deli platter and a veg tray with dip