With a sound inspired by the San Francisco tech boom, the hyperpop musician is entering the big leagues, and has a slot on Charli xcx’s tour. First she needs to get over her own shyness – not to mention a fear of love songs

The life of a rising pop star: One day, you’re performing your own song with Charli xcx, her dancers emulating your choreography, an arena’s worth of fans screaming along. The next, you’re on a surgery table, with a healthcare professional yanking four superfluous teeth out of your mouth. Even pop stars need emergency dental work sometimes.

It’s all par for the course for April Grey, the San Francisco-born, Chicago-based musician who records as Underscores. Her 2026 has been, plainly, wild: her third album, U, released in March, was met with acclaim and attracted a small army of new fans. Many of the shows on her tour in support of U, earlier this year, were upgraded due to demand, and one expects the bump she’ll get from her current run supporting Charli xcx’s Music, Fashion, Film tour will push her into even bigger rooms. It’s a blow-up befitting the level of ambition Grey put into U, which is a taut, compulsively listenable pop record that sounds like a mid-2000s Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation as recreated by Aphex Twin. “As I was making it, it felt like a very big swing for the fences,” she says. “I wanted it to be big.”

A selection of winners and notable finalists in the awards celebrating the art of music photography, which saw 24,500 images submitted from 42 countries

Barclays Center, Brooklyn

The tireless star brings her latest, somewhat over-explained album to the stage for a dazzling and euphoric show

For more than a year now, I have often returned, when seeking a bar for which to measure true pop transcendence, to the memory of Charli xcx taking the Other Stage at Glastonbury: the unofficial headliner, a year out from her culture-shifting opus Brat, commanded a dizzying 60,000 people with an imperious “don’t fucking play with me” and the stunning brute force of a performer at peak power. It was surreal, as a longtime fan, to witness an artist who was as recently as 2022 playing to cult followings in 2,000-cap venues convert thousands more in real time, to see years of hard-earned pop instincts and artistry collide with the zeitgeist in a career-defining, you-had-to-be-there achievement.

But life goes on, of course, and Charli, like the rest of us who surfed the high of Brat summer 2024, found herself on an inevitable comedown. A lesser artist may have confronted the question of what comes next with blunt commercial logic – more, again – but Charli, a self-professed workaholic and tireless interrogator of one’s own image, proved to be creatively restless, if scattered. A cinephile rebrand, three films at Sundance, an Instagram-dominating celebrity wedding, a defanged satire of her own sudden ubiquity, a windswept soundtrack that more or less saved the otherwise dreadful Wuthering Heights – all suggested a self-aware ambivalence with mainstream success that threatened to corrode all that came after. With the release this July of Music, Fashion, Film, her eighth studio album, I worried that she had succumbed to a seemingly manic drive to stay visible. The album, a deceptively vulnerable and winking pivot to rock that was either self-aggrandizing pastiche or genius, depending on what angle/substance/context you beheld it, did not seem to stand up the scrutiny and over-explanation of relentless celebrity promotion.

Referencing Tarkovsky and French theory, the Austrian-Iranian singer is writing some of today’s wittiest music – though she’s ‘too pop for the art world, too indie-darling for the mainstream’

You wait ages for a brilliant pop song about film-making and then two come along at once. Following on from Charli xcx’s Camera comes Actress by Sofie Royer, with lyrics referencing rotoscoping, call sheets, screenplays, establishing shots, cinéma verité and more. “When the dust settles on your heart / I’d like to audition for the leading part,” she purrs over pumping disco, screwball-funny as she stacks up the metaphors to woo some Letterboxd-brained beau. “My mise-en-scène is flawless, don’t you know I’m quite adored / I’ll win you over in 35mm 4K-restored.”

It’s a typically smart and witty number from a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and, as it happens, aspiring actor, whose erudition and taste light up one of the best albums of the year, the forthcoming Before/After. Its lead single Cowboy Mouth is a recreation of a Sam Shepard play in song; another song makes a catchy funk-pop chorus from the word “sesquicentennial”. Her music is cosmopolitan enough to sit Italo disco next to new wave and garage rock, and across her discography there’s a big cast of cultural figures from Andrei Tarkovsky to Kenneth Anger, Luigi Mangione to Ivy Wolk, knowingness offset by her keen sense of humour.

Reading Festival

There’s not much time to dig into her deep catalogue of future-facing pop, but she satisfies the hardcore

“Time itself is a circle,” as the rock’n’roll philosopher Nietzsche once said, accurately foreshadowing Charli xcx’s only UK festival appearance this summer. Like her performance on Glastonbury’s Other Stage last year – a pyrotechnic farewell to the puke-green reign of Brat – Charli’s Reading and Leeds appearance is a not-quite-headline slot that also follows a rowdy set from grime don Skepta.

Yet in the past 14 months, everything else in Charli’s pop factory has undergone a hard reset. She’s released two albums – a grandiose, gothic soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and last month’s high-concept Music, Fashion, Film, an album of raw, glitching micro-rock, with guitars shredded into Tetris-like pieces, and fitted with lacerating lyrics about shopping, egotism and mortality. She’s also launched an acting career, thrown a big fat celebrity wedding and, somewhere along the way, found time to rehearse her biggest, most vertiginous show to date.

They’re expensive, elaborate – and may not contain all the music. After Olivia Rodrigo, Charli xcx and more sent out incomplete or unfinished vinyl versions, fans are feeling shortchanged

It was one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year: Charli xcx teaming up with film-maker David Cronenberg for No One Lasts Forever, the closing track on her new album Music, Fashion, Film, which debuted at No 1 in the UK.

But for fans who pre-ordered what was advertised as the “full-length” album on vinyl, an unwelcome surprise awaits. The song doesn’t contain the spoken-word contribution from Cronenberg – an astonishing reflection on art, death and eternity – that is included on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever

Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.”

While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is set to reach the director’s biggest audience to date, opening to 700 US screens this week, a stunning figure for an independent film and a wider opening than recent films by indie veterans like Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch.

Celebrities including Charli xcx and Gabbriette and avant-garde brands honour tradition while also rejecting it

If a wedding day brings to mind a bride dressed in a big white dress, the styles coming down the aisle in the near future may strike you as a little different. Whether it is through celebrity references, or new brands, wedding gowns are entering a more experimental era.

For Charli xcx’s marriage to the 1975 drummer George Daniel last year, the bride wore a minidress and sunglasses.

Pop star is celebrated as ‘one of the defining cultural figures of her generation’ by gallery, which acquires Brat-era portrait by Harley Weir

A portrait of Charli xcx has been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, in the week that she hopes for a No 1 chart position for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.

The photograph by Harley Weir was taken in 2023 and became one of the key images associated with Charli’s Brat era: the 2024 album that became a pop cultural phenomenon for its candour and debauchery.

The glitch-pop great is back with a banger-stuffed new album, and reality TV may have some new stars thanks to Channel 4. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

After a decade in the pop fringes, Charli xcx’s 2024 album Brat propelled her to global stardom: an acid-green ‘Brat summer’, a Glastonbury headline slot and brat as Collins’ word of the year.

But how do you follow up the album that made you a star?

Charli’s latest album Music, Fashion, Film has now been released – and as Guardian deputy music editor Laura Snapes tells Lucy Hough: it’s a pivot to guitar and a “meta masterpiece about the instability of identity.”

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

Gigs by Gallagher brothers, Coldplay, Lana Del Rey and Beyonce gives £11bn boost to the economy

Big name artists including Oasis with their highly anticipated reunion tour, Coldplay and Beyoncé helped to attract a record number of fans to travel to watch live music last year, helped by a surge in overseas visitors at UK gigs.

A report from the industry body UK Music estimated that 24.7 million “music tourists” attended concerts and festivals last year, up 4.8% on 2024, leading to an unprecedented £11.2bn of spending across the UK economy.

In a collapsing world, artists like Slayyyter and Cobrah are chasing extreme highs with hyperactive music and debauched lyrics. Is their trashy vibe emancipating – or a bit contrived?

If any year demanded a soundtrack of self-aggrandising female mayhem, it’s 2026. Amid the terrors of war, AI and the climate crisis, women are expected to be symbolic vessels of order and stability: thin, beautiful and perpetually 25 – a state of perfection newly available for purchase thanks to weight-loss drugs and the deep plane facelift.

Covered unironically in leopard print and rhinestones, a cohort of young female pop stars are defying this familiar con with brash electronic pop, shamelessly hedonistic lyrics, anarchic sexuality and an obsession with what was once dismissed as “white trash”. It’s an aesthetic embraced by performers such as Slayyyter, Kim Petras, Cobrah, Demi Lovato, Snow Strippers’ Tatiana Schwaninger, Tove Lo and returning scene godmother Kesha.

(Atlantic)
The lyrics may argue the dancefloor is dead, but this funny, wilfully plasticky new single isn’t the total about-turn from Brat that fans expected

Last month, Charli xcx began the media campaign for her seventh studio album by giving an interview to Vogue magazine. The ensuing feature caused an impressive degree of online consternation, not because the 33-year-old star had said anything particularly controversial, but because she had suggested that the follow-up to 2024’s Brat would sound markedly different to its predecessor. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said, not unreasonably declining to chase Brat’s vast success by attempting to replicate it. (Although, in fairness, you could have probably worked that out from House, the noisy, experimental collaboration with John Cale she released at the end of last year as the first single from her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights.)

She also played the interviewer a track that contained both “heavily processed guitars” and the lyrics “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”: Vogue duly ran with the idea, trumpeting Charli xcx’s “rock reinvention” in both the headline and on its cover and other news outlets picked up on the story – “CHARLI XCX CONFIRMS ROCK ALBUM”. What one journalist tactfully called “heated discourse online from some fans and artists within the music industry” followed, eventually prompting the singer to respond, posting “a video of me making a song called Rock Music that is not actually rock music which is funny because I never said I was making a rock album”.

Event chairs Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour have guests dress to the theme ‘Fashion is art’ at the event controversially funded by new honorary chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

The stars of David Lowery’s psychodrama on the secrets behind creating music for a fictional pop diva

As David Lowery, the director, was writing the fictional pop star Mother Mary for his new film of the same name, he spent a lot of time studying the last 25 years in music. He listened to Taylor Swift (whose Reputation concert film inspired the performances in the film), Lorde and FKA twigs, who appears on screen as a medium named Imogene. But as the film’s haunted love story between Mary (played by Anne Hathaway) and her former best friend and designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) emerged, his listening habits shifted.

“The pop music fell away and other music started to enter that sphere,” he says in A24’s New York offices. He’s sitting beside twigs and Hathaway the day after the trio attended the film’s premiere in the city. “James Blake and Aldous Harding really captured the emotion that I was trying to type out between Sam and Mother Mary. They began to help me channel the feeling of the movie itself.”

Music from Charli xcx can’t save David Lowery’s dour chamber piece, despite some flashes of dazzling style

For a certain stripe of pop fan, diva worship comes along with having a high tolerance for their unique flavor of psychobabble. So when Anne Hathaway, as the titular singer in David Lowery’s Mother Mary, declares that her new single Spooky Action is about Einstein’s “transubstantiation of feelings”, I ignored the snorts from those in the theater beside me. Finally, I thought, fondly casting my mind back to when Lady Gaga would talk about her music as a reverse Warholian explosion: a pop star who is not afraid to lean into high-concept nonsense. My generosity quickly faded when I began to realize that Mother Mary – the character and the film – was missing a crucial component for any modern pop star worth their salt: self-awareness.

Mother Mary is a one-time music A-lister in search of a comeback after a mysterious event that has taken her out of commission. She seems … haunted, and is experiencing a fashion emergency to boot, unable to find anything to wear for her imminent return to the stage. Three days before she is due to make her big appearance she turns up in the rain at the gothic mansion of fashion designer Sam Anselm (an enjoyably over-the-top Michaela Coel), looking like a rat caught in a monsoon, begging for an outfit that “feels like me”. Sam has moved on considerably since she was Mother Mary’s partner in fashion, and perhaps her lover behind closed doors too. In fact, she entirely loathes the pop star. “You are a carcinogen, you are a tumor,” Sam says in an amusingly ominous voiceover. “The bile is rising.”

Spoof documentaries once skewered subjects by dialling comic ingenuity up to 11, but the genre has stagnated – replaced by showbiz puff pieces and right-wing provocations. Has their time passed?

In the satirical mockumentary The Moment, Charli xcx fears (and eventually embraces) the death of Brat summer, the cultural sensation that made her sixth album a phenomenon. But the film – which stars the singer as a fictionalised version of herself – strains to land jokes out of Charli’s identity crisis and lacks the giddily intoxicating rush of that 2024 album. Watching The Moment shortly after its lukewarm reception at Sundance, I sensed something dying, but it wasn’t Brat – it was the mockumentary style itself.

How did mockumentaries grow so … tiresome? Once a novel narrative format brilliantly deployed by directors such as Christopher Guest and the late Rob Reiner, the mockumentary now feels nearly as stale as the formulaic films it aims to lampoon. It’s a sad state of affairs. For much of the last half-century, faux-documentary film-making flourished under the perverse minds of countless comedy greats, from Monty Python’s Eric Idle, who lampooned Beatlemania with 1978’s wackily irreverent mock-doc The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, to Albert Brooks, who made his directorial debut with 1979’s proto-reality television spoof Real Life.

It’s not about John Bishop, Anna Wintour or Bill Clinton, but … Screen stories about pop stars, actors, sporting heroes or politicians bend fact by steering close to the deeds, or misdeeds, of real celebrities. What’s behind their rise?

Any self-respecting cinemagoer will know the phrase by heart: “The characters and events portrayed in this film are fictitious.” It’s cinema’s ritual boilerplate disclaimer. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental and unintentional.”

Lately, however, film-makers have been treating the fine print like a challenge. A clutch of recent releases has taken up a curious middle ground: not quite biography, not quite fiction, but something more slippery in between. Marty Supreme, for instance, spins 1950s table tennis wildcard Marty Reisman into Marty Mauser, borrowing Reisman’s forename and forehand while rewriting the rest. Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? mines the early career of standup comic John Bishop, only to rebrand him as New Yorker Alex Novak. And later this year The Prince, directed by Cameron Van Hoy and written by David Mamet, will refract aspects of Hunter Biden’s life through proxy Parker Scott.