After two years of Brat-mania, Charli XCX looks like she’s ready to turn a new page. She’s gotten married twice, embraced her acting chops, and started posting sprawling reviews on Letterboxd. But now, it seems, she’s pivoting to yet another new artistic medium: blogging on Substack.
On Wednesday, the pop star posted her first blog-slash-essay as itscharlibb (no caps) on Substack, where she mused about the meaning of her art, what Brat has morphed into in the hands of her fans (“the umbilical cord is cut and naturally everyone begins to project the work onto themselves”), and whether releasing an album is akin to birthing a baby. On this last point, she concludes: “Obviously to most people a baby is not the same as an album, but to me it kind of is … Clearly I’m not ready to be a mother.”
Over the course of more than 1,500 words, the 33-year-old explained that in the time since Brat exploded worldwide, she’d run out of creative inspiration. “I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way,” she wrote. “I couldn’t really even listen to music without feeling depressed.” But everything changed when, in December last year, she got a text from an unknown number that happened to be Saltburn director Emerald Fennell. Apparently the duo had crossed paths before — they once used the same glam team and rubbed elbows at a house party near the Chateau Marmont — but had never collaborated. Fennell then sent her the script for her upcoming Wuthering Heights project starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie. Charli writes: “I called Emerald and asked her what she was hoping for from my read of the script. She coyly suggested ‘A song?’ and I suggested ‘An album?’”
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Immersing herself in the world of the film and the 1847 novel it’s adapted from (to this, she says, “tysm Emily Brontë”) apparently filled Charli’s cup creatively. She was stimulated once more by a story that felt, she writes, “undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar.” She was especially excited by the project’s thematic distance from Brat: “Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living … I was fucking IN.”
By the sounds of it, we’re probably going to see a lot more of Charli XCX in the broader cinematic world. As for the Substack of it all, it’s unclear if we’ll be hearing from her on a weekly or monthly cadence, but, for the record, I’ll take as much as she’s willing to give. Will she join the inevitable Substack-to-self-published-novel pipeline? Will she host a semi-clothed reading at Basement? The options are limitless.
