The primary impulse I have after listening to Charli XCX’s new album is not to debate whether it’s the proper, or perhaps properly improper, follow-up to the pop singer’s 2024 season-and-color-and-lexicography-defining hit record Brat. It’s to be in an arena, shouting along to David Cronenberg intoning, “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever,” as he does over and over at the end of the final track of Music, Fashion, Film. It’s a sample from a conversation Charli XCX had with the 83-year-old Canadian body-horror auteur last year about a health crisis in which he collapsed on the sidewalk. She asks what went through his mind in that moment: Did he think about his art? Of course not, he says. He thought about people, about life. Art is not about immortality—if it lives on beyond its makers, they’ll never know, and they are much better off that way. “Hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom,” he insists. “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”
Published: July 24, 2026 5:54 pm
Source: Slate — Read original