Charli xcx Brings Electrifying Pop Evolution to Brooklyn

Charli xcx brought her Music, Fashion, Film tour to Barclays Center in Brooklyn, delivering what our reviewer calls a dazzling and euphoric staging of her somewhat over-explained eighth album.

The show arrives at a paradoxical moment in the British pop star's career. For more than a year, the benchmark for true pop transcendence has remained her Other Stage set at Glastonbury: the unofficial headliner, a year out from her culture-shifting album Brat, commanded some 60,000 people with an imperious "don't fucking play with me" and, in the reviewer's words, "the stunning brute force of a performer at peak power." That set has since become a career-defining, you-had-to-be-there achievement.

The scale of the transformation remains striking. As recently as 2022, Charli was playing to cult followings in 2,000-capacity venues. At Glastonbury, longtime fans watched her convert thousands more in real time, as years of hard-earned pop instincts collided with the zeitgeist.

Since then, the comedown from Brat summer 2024 has been inevitable, and Charli has met it with creative restlessness rather than blunt commercial logic. A lesser artist might have simply answered the question of what comes next with "more, again." Instead, she has pursued a cinephile rebrand: three films at Sundance, an Instagram-dominating celebrity wedding, a defanged satire of her own sudden ubiquity, and a windswept soundtrack that, in the reviewer's judgment, more or less saved the otherwise dreadful Wuthering Heights.

Taken together, these moves suggested a self-aware ambivalence with mainstream success that threatened to corrode everything that came after.

The album at the center of the tour, Music, Fashion, Film, released this July, initially provoked concern that Charli had succumbed to a manic drive to stay visible. The record — a deceptively vulnerable, winking pivot to rock — struck the reviewer as either self-aggrandizing pastiche or genius, "depending on what angle/substance/context you beheld it," and it did not seem to withstand the scrutiny and over-explanation of relentless celebrity promotion.

On stage at Barclays Center, that tension appears to resolve. The tireless star, as the review's standfirst puts it, brings the album to life as "a dazzling and euphoric show" — electrifying and deafening in equal measure.

The Brooklyn date suggests the tour may do for Music, Fashion, Film what live performance did for Brat: convert scepticism into communal euphoria, one arena at a time.