FEATURE:
Modern Heroines
PHOTO CREDIT: Burak Cingi for The Line of Best Fit
Part Twenty-Eight: Charli XCX
___________
LIKE most of my Modern Heroines features…
I am going to focus on the most-recent album from Charli XCX, how I’m feeling now, and introduce some reviews and interviews around the time of its release. Charli XCX (Charlotte Emma Aitchison) was born in Cambridge and raised in Start Hill, Essex. She began posting songs on Myspace in 2008 - which led to her discovery by a promoter who invited her to perform at warehouse raves and parties. In 2010. She signed a recording contract with Asylum Records, releasing a series of singles and mixtapes throughout 2011 and 2012. Not to ignore her first three albums – I shall combine songs from all of her albums in a playlist at the end -, but how i’m feeling now is such an important one. 2013’s True Romance was a promising debut that combined sounds of 1980s’ Pop and girl group spark; many of its songs – such as Stay Away, and You’re the One – are among Charli XCX’s very best. 2014’s Sucker had a bit more punch than her debut. The album sounds so fresh and magnificent! I really love 2019’s Charli, as it was more experimental, wide-ranging and ambitious than her first two albums. There is a great blend of styles and themes and, despite the fact the album was recorded at many different studios and has quite a few producers in the mix, it is Charli XCX’s songwriting and talent that shines. Charli is a consistent and almost flawless album that took her music to a new level.
Only eight months after Charli was released, we saw how i’m feeling now released into the world. On 6th April, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a public Zoom call with fans that she would be working on a new album in self-isolation. During the call, she said the album would be indicative of lockdown times: the fact she had all the technology at home to create an album and make the videos. The entire project was done in collaboration with her fans, where she used Zoom calls to share demos and text conversations with producers - and she asked fan for input on single releases, song ideas, and artwork. The album arrived on 15th May, 2020, and it is one of the very best of last year. I am not sure whether lockdown and the pandemic brought something out of Charli XCX that we had not seen before; a new layer of brilliance and innovation that was maybe not quite there before. As I said, I love all of her albums, though how i’m feeling now is her finest release yet! I want to bring in a couple of the reviews for the album. This is what CLASH wrote when they heard how i’m feeling now:
“Her humanoid vocals on ‘Detonate’ are reminiscent of Kate Bush’s ‘Deeper Understanding’ from her ‘Directors Cut’ album, and explore the romance of the robotic - alien yet strangely familiar. This track resonates hard though its lyrical vulnerability accompanied by lighter production. Its classic warped auto-tune is ever-present but dialled down to be an overall more accessible pop song. ‘Detonate’s’ tight lyricism contrasts with the repetitive lyrics of ‘7 years’, which feels rushed in places, “Oh yeah, it's really, really, really, really nice / And now I never, ever, ever think twice” leaving moments which fall flat.
‘party 4 u’ is a moment of respite amongst the brilliant chaos, allowing us to take a breath, while ‘c2.0’ (co-written by lawless Estonian rapper Tommy Cash) sounds like a laptop overheating and my hairdryer exploding all at once. The album peaks and troughs, the single tracks standing out while others can be glossed over more easily, yet throughout the abrasive jolting and glitching, one thing remains constant, a solid pop chorus with catchy melodies.
The album closes with 'visions': a brilliant illustration of A. G. Cook's genius all too reminiscent of leaving a sweaty club as the sun comes up. The heavy beats and sirens evoke a memory which usually I do not intend to remember, yet in lockdown circumstances, leaves me pining for it once again, and therefore wanting more of the album itself. As her opening line of the album states “I just wanna go real hard” accompanied by a sense of impending doom, I sigh and think to myself: me too Charli, me too.
‘how i’m feeling now’ is essentially a series of android love letters; to her relationship (and how it has grown throughout lockdown), to her fans (whom she has involved every step of the way), her friends and contributors, and to herself, as she has opened up about mental health during the lockdown, and the fear of how to continue once it is over, with lyrics pondering whether she is deserving of love. This directly contrasts with boasting her rarity as a ‘pink diamond’ in the first track.
Charli starts and ends with hard disorienting club bangers, leaving the middle of the album space to expose her tenderness and vulnerability while still retaining her futuristic, unpredictable sound and penchant for an irresistible pop hook”.
Certainly, how i’m feeling now is one of my favourite albums from the last few years. pink diamond, forever, and claws are an incredible trio of opening tracks. The fact that the album was created and released in such an unusual way could have dented its quality and impact. I think that the collaborative approach and the fact that Charli XCX was not moving between studios (and she delivered the album so soon after Charli) creates this urgency. That said, there are so many layers and nuances. You listen to the songs and they unravel over time; these wonder songs that go from pole to pole in terms of emotion. Charli XCX’s constant ability to come up with exceptional Pop hooks is evident on how i’m feeling now. In their review, this is what AllMusic had to say:
“If any pop star is uniquely equipped to be creative during hard times, it's Charli XCX. As her steady stream of singles, EPs, mixtapes, albums, and collaborations attest, being productive is her natural state of being. She's also remarkably connected to her fans and other artists through her social media platforms, and used this very 2020s version of fame to invite fans into her creative process. In the early days of sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, she vowed to create a brand-new album in just six weeks, using the tools she had at hand as well as the input of her fans and trusted producers like A. G. Cook and BJ Burton. In many ways, the humbly titled how i'm feeling now, with its lowercase spelling and lack of punctuation, captures the frozen-in-time yet fleeting feel of quarantine life as it returns to the fundamentals of her music.
This isn't an album of acoustic guitar ruminations -- if anything, it shows XCX is just as committed to making cutting-edge electronic pop music while holed up in her L.A. home as she was when she could work face-to-face with her creative team. Featuring production by 100 gecs' Dylan Brady, "claws" pits an innocent singsong melody against booming bass and clanking trap rhythms that sound like they might have been made by wind-up toys. She pushes the envelope even farther with the streaking, overtly futuristic "pink diamond" and "c2.0," a track whose rubbery tones and helium-laced vocals call to mind the work of her frequent collaborator SOPHIE. Aside from "party 4 u," which feels like a miniature of Charli's more introspective moments, how i'm feeling now's songwriting has a smaller scope than it did on her last album, but XCX makes up for that by packing in as many hooks and feelings as she can. Equally sweet and challenging, mischievous and heartfelt, "forever" is pure Charli XCX. When she sings about staying emotionally close "even when we're not together," she touches on connections that were even more treasured at the time of the album's release, when many people were forced to be alone and jobs, relationships, and lives were in flux. And though the album's songs aren't literally about living in quarantine, they're certainly relatable.
On the pensive Palmistry, Cook, and Mechatok-produced "i finally understand," XCX digs into the feelings, good and bad, that being truly intimate with someone -- and having time to reflect on a relationship -- engenders. It's a mood she expands on blissfully with "7 years" and with more ambivalence on "enemy," one of the album's prettiest and most fleshed-out songs. While it may not be the proper sequel to the ambitious Charli, how i'm feeling now's rawness and immediacy give it an appeal all its own. More than just an interesting social media experiment or a way to fend off quarantine boredom, it's an artistic challenge that's true to the very best parts of XCX's music”.
I am going to finish off with a couple of interviews from Charli XCX. I would advise people to read all of the Vulture interview with Charli XCX. Conducted shortly before the release of how i’m feeling now, there are a few selection that I wanted to bring in:
“Three weeks before How I’m Feeling Now’s scheduled release, Charli stress-cried about the album, but today’s she’s feeling good. Isolation suits her better than she’d expected. “Obviously, I wish this wasn’t the situation we’re all in,” she tells me. “But I’m quite enjoying what self-isolation is forcing me to do, which is to be really present in my space.” Earlier that morning, she hosted the second of her weekly Zoom conferences, where she fields questions from fans and conducts mini interviews with friends about staying sane in lockdown; today’s guests include Paris Hilton, decked out in giant heart-shaped sunglasses and a pink velour tracksuit. “What’s your specialty?” Charli asks when Paris tells her she’s been getting into cooking. “Sliving lasagna,” Paris replies in her signature sexbot drone. “Sliving is my new trademark. It’s the new ‘that’s hot.’ It means slaying and living.” (There’s a recipe.)”.
Which brings us to the heart of How I’m Feeling Now: Where previous albums offered odes to after-hours raves and fast cars, this time Charli’s drawing almost exclusively from her relationship, chronicling the ways in which it has intensified while the couple has been alone together. “Oh God, what year would it have been …” Charli muses when I ask how she and Huck first met. “2013? No, 2012,” says a man’s muffled voice in the background. “We don’t really know,” Charli says, laughing; regardless, she was on the last leg of tour with a band called St. Lucia, which Kwong happened to be managing at the time. After the final NYC show, everyone hung out at a bar next to the Bowery Ballroom. “That’s when we met, but what was funny was he was on a first date with somebody else that night, and I had a boyfriend at the time,” she remembers. “So we spent the next few years being really into each other from afar but having really bad timing.”
How I’m Feeling Now is as much about how it came together as it is the songs themselves, a collaborative snapshot of what’s sure to be a bizarre memory. For years, Charli’s records have made the case that the future is now, if you want it. But it’s a weird time to be a futurist. If the future is now, it isn’t exactly as exhilarating as her earlier songs, full of 4 a.m. joyrides and heavenly synth choirs, made it seem; these days, time is lost in the void of one’s phone, a woefully inadequate substitute for real human connection. “But I think being a human being, and part of why we’ve survived, is our ability to adapt,” Charli counters when I ask if this is our increasingly virtual future and if we can bear it. “If you had told me last year that in 2020, we’d all be separated from each other, isolated in our homes, only speaking by FaceTime, and there’s this thing called Zoom and everyone’s throwing parties on it, I’d be like, Whoa, that sounds futuristic. But it just feels like normality”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Griffin Lotz
I am going to wrap up soon, but I just want to end with an interview from The Guardian. It is quite revealing looking at interviews with Charli XCX. Not just in terms of how her latest album came together, but how her career has progressed:
“A few weeks before lockdown, Aitchison had started therapy to unpick the roots of her workaholism: How I’m Feeling Now is her sixth full-length album in seven years. She had been enjoying “slowing down, and being still and present at home. But the fact that I decided to do the album shows I couldn’t continue like that. I’m always forward, forward, forward,” she says, with the intensity of a general directing troops.
Of course, nobody becomes a pop star to slack off these days; it’s more important than ever to maintain a constant presence on Spotify playlists and social media. Still, the 1975 frontman Matt Healy – whose recordings with Aitchison have yet to see the light of day – tells me she is on another level. “She just wants to work all the time. I’m bad, but she’s worse.” Collaborating with her is like “taking psychedelics”, he says: there are “rushes of madness and excitement, but you are left feeling rewarded, thankful and reflective. Although still drained”.
Aitchison’s DIY ethos has been there since she started playing raves at 15. Her parents would drive her from their home in Bishop’s Stortford to Hackney warehouses, where she shrieked about dinosaur sex in a peroxide wig while they waited to drive her home. “Playing in those more underground environments, and being exposed to fashion and LGBTQ+ culture – that was the first time I felt truly inspired to my core,” she says. “It was like I’d opened Pandora’s box.” She was signed by Atlantic Records off the back of those shows, and her early releases revamped a gothic pop that had lain dormant since the 1980s (think Shakespears Sister and Depeche Mode). Prior to the pandemic, she had mooted a tour of her 2013 debut album, True Romance. “It was one of the first things I really got stuck into – a lot of experimentation and figuring things out as they went along,” she explains. “Kind of a similar time to now.”
These days, stardom no longer depends on mass exposure and mainstream success. Social media’s most vocal fans (especially queer pop fans) have crowned a class of cult acts who might once have been dismissed as flops: musicians fluent in pop’s aesthetic while not necessarily aspiring to its scale, such as Haim, Christine and the Queens, and Carly Rae Jepsen – all of whom have collaborated with Aitchison. Her most recent album, 2019’s Charli, spawned two hits, with Troye Sivan and Lizzo, and this time, mainstream success felt more meaningful. “When I was younger, I didn’t know who I was – I wanted to fit in with the music I was making and the way I looked,” she explains. “Now I don’t feel that, and I think it speaks volumesfor how the pop industry has changed.”
How I’m Feeling Now already has one important legacy. Aitchison says she has been surprised by how fast her label have moved to get it out, and plans to release two more albums this year. Next time around, if they stall, she’s got this ace in her pocket to remind them that anything is possible: “No, guys, remember when we did that album in six weeks? No rules – let’s go”.
I think that Charli XCX is one of the world’s very best artists and, as she seems to get stronger by the album, that makes for a very interesting future! I feel that the next year will be a struggle, as artists cannot really gig and get out there. Charli XCX has performed some virtual gigs, and she has been able to promote how i’m feeling now. I feel next year will be a massive one for her, in the sense she will tour internationally and, maybe, we will get another album. Her music has the power to stop you in your tracks and engross the senses! A definite icon of the future, go and check out her albums and see what I mean! I have ended with a playlist of her finest songs to date that proves that Charlotte Emma Aitchison is….
AN absolute sensation.