Charli xcx
Charli xcx is an actor, born 1992.
Charlotte Aitchison was uploading songs to Myspace in 2008, before she had a label, a manager, or a settled idea of what a Charli XCX record sounded like. The London rave scene came next, then a deal with Asylum Records in 2010, then several years of singles and mixtapes that circulated without breaking anything open. Her first taste of the top of the chart came attached to someone else's name: she was on Icona Pop's "I Love It" in 2012, a UK number one. Her own debut album, True Romance (2013), did not sell.
What happened next is the part worth paying attention to. Instead of chasing the sound that had worked for other people, she spent the back half of the 2010s making pop that argued with itself, working alongside the producers around the PC Music collective and treating distortion, pitch-shifted vocals and abrasive synth textures as hooks rather than as damage. It cost her the mainstream for a while and bought her something more durable: a body of work that other pop records started borrowing from. By the time BRAT arrived in 2024, the sound she had been building for a decade was the sound everybody else was chasing.
The acting is newer and, on the evidence of this page, deliberate. For years the screen credits were voice work and cameos: Willow in The Angry Birds Movie (2016), Kitty in UglyDolls (2019), an aristocrat in the animated Major Lazer, herself in concert films and awards shows. Then the 2025 and 2026 slate lands all at once, with Rosa in 100 Nights of Hero, parts in Faces of Death, Erupcja, The Gallerist, I Want Your Sex and Sacrifice, and a version of herself in The Moment. That is a lot of films for a performer who has never carried one, and the open question is which director gets a real performance out of her.
Movies (11)
TV (4)
Music (8)
Where to start with Charli xcx
Start with BRAT. It is the record where the abrasive club instincts and the diary-entry writing finally stop fighting each other, and it works whether you want to dance to it or read the lyrics twice. Then go backwards rather than forwards: Pop 2 is the sound of a pop star giving herself permission, and it is still the most extreme thing under her name. how i’m feeling now was made fast and alone and sounds like it, which is exactly the point of it. Charli sits between the two, glossier and more collaborative, and is the gentlest first listen if BRAT feels like too much at once.
On screen she is still finding the register. 100 Nights of Hero hands her an actual character rather than a version of herself, which makes it a better test than The Moment, where the distance between performer and part is the whole joke.