Charli xcx stages her pop as an encounter with La Haine

Paris – 24 July 2026: Charli xcx releases her new album Music, Fashion, Film this Friday and relocates the setting of her pop universe to France. In the recently released video for Camera, the British singer meets Vincent Cassel. The actor, whose face remains inseparably linked with Mathieu Kassovitz’ film La Haine, becomes not merely a prominent guest but a symbol of an entire cinematic memory.

The video quotes the raw black-and-white visual world of the cult film released in 1995 without recreating it as a museum piece. Cassel reprises a famous passage by his then-character Hubert; Charli xcx observes and arranges the scene with the calculated unease that characterizes her recent work. Pop may be polished here, but it must by no means look polished. It wears a leather jacket, a cigarette and a hint of big-city melancholy.

La Haine once told the story of three young men in the suburbs of Paris, of anger, police violence and a society at the limits of its patience. The fact that Charli xcx invokes this particular work as a visual backdrop is more than a fashionable reference. The singer takes its iconic surface seriously while keeping her distance from a mere copy. Her camera looks at fame, gender roles and being seen itself.

The title Camera suits this play with gazes and control. Charli xcx, who has recently also become increasingly present in the film world, turns the music video into a reflection on the pop machine: who directs, who is put on display, who is still allowed to tell a story again? Vincent Cassel embodies French auteur cinema, international star status and the peculiar longevity of a single film line that has never quite fallen silent.

Music, Fashion, Film arrives as the successor to the defining Brat phase, yet the new record audibly departs from its glaring club impulse. Eleven tracks make up a deliberately unruly album that combines guitars, electronic friction and small theatrical gestures. The advance releases Rock Music and SS26 had already suggested that Charli xcx is less interested in a stylistic about-turn than in productive uncertainty.

The album title places music, fashion and film on equal footing, and that is precisely its program. The three fields are not arranged side by side as decoration, but treated as forms of the same public self-staging. Where Brat celebrated the moment of collective overheating, Music, Fashion, Film looks at the scenery afterward: at vanity, exhaustion, the pleasure of striking a pose and the desire to start anew once more despite it all.

There is a subtle irony in the fact that this comeback leads to Paris via La Haine of all things. The film was never merely style, and Charli xcx apparently knows that this is why its visual language demands resistance. Camera does not turn this into a political retelling. But the video demonstrates how contemporary a French classic can feel when pop does not plunder it, but gives it a new, restless echo.