Charli XCX, Charli, review: danceable and deeply personal On her third album, fast cars, futuristic sounds, weird beats and high-profile guest slots can’t cover up raw emotion

Charli XCX

Charli

★★★★

Charli XCX would make a cracking mixtape. I mean that not in the hip hop culture sense – although she’s knocked out a few of those over the years – but the mixtapes you used to make for your friends and crushes.

There’s every chance that the 27-year-old Charli has never made a physical mixtape, but no matter: Charli, with its mixture of styles and guest features from across the worlds of rap, pop and hip hop, is her gift to you.

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Much as those physical mixtapes always revealed more than you intended, Charli is a deeply personal work on which fast cars, futuristic sounds, weird beats and high-profile guest slots can’t cover up raw emotion.

Take “Thoughts”, a sort-of stream-of-consciousness filtered through autotune, an air raid siren and the slow-moving cocoon that is LA traffic. Or “White Mercedes”, a sad-girl slow dance of surprisingly delicate vocal dexterity with its devastating closer: “all I know is I don’t deserve you”.

‘Intimacy spills onto the feature tracks , even when feelings are disguised as party anthems’

It’s an intimacy that spills onto the feature tracks too, even when the feelings are disguised as party anthems. Lizzo collaboration “Blame It On Your Love” is romantic, sensual and danceable, while “Gone” finds Charli duetting with Christine and the Queens over the pulsing industrial wasteland beat of a breaking heart.

There’s plenty of fun here too: time travelling with Troye Sivan to a “1999” neither can quite remember, and “Click”, all fast-moving wordplay and futuristic dazzle.

‘Charli’ is released on Asylum and Atlantic records on Friday 13 September

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