It’s been quite the year for Charli XCX. Brat has been out almost 12 months and remains in the Billboard Top 40. Her American tour included four sold-out nights at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, and a set of European shows starts next month. And she’s prepping to star in The Moment, a mock-doc about a pop star on tour. How could Charli ever top all of that? Turns out, she’s not too worried about it.
“I don’t really feel the pressure to create another record like Brat,” she said during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival this week.
And while her next album may be a ways off, Charli is already coming to terms with the fact that it might not fare as well as Brat. “When I was making [Brat], even though I really believed in it and totally knew what I wanted to do with it, I had no idea how it would be received,” she continued. “ … So yeah, I don’t really feel the pressure because I feel that you can never really do the same thing twice, and my next record will probably be a flop, which I’m down for to be honest.”
Refreshingly forthright comments like that won’t thrill her team, but then again, Charli won’t have much time in the immediate future to make another record. On June 5, she starts the European leg of her tour, which includes stops at the Parklife Festival (Manchester), Glastonbury (Somerset, U.K.), and the Roskilde Festival (Denmark). She just released a first-ever video for the How I’m Feeling Now track, “Party 4 U,” five years after its release.
Meanwhile, a movie career continues to beckon. Charli will also be seen in the upcoming erotic thriller I Want Your Sex alongside Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman; the satire Sacrifice with Chris Evans as a movie star kidnapped by a cult; and the fantasy film 100 Nights of Hero. Two years ago, Charli also completed filming a role in a remake of the 1978 horror film Faces of Death that’s still awaiting release.
In light of that intersection of film and music in her life, the next new music Charli fans could hear might be the score she and Jack Antonoff are producing for the Anne Hathaway film Mother Mary. Whether it will be a flop or not remains to be seen.
