Charli xcx’s “Magic Metal Montana” is the beating heart of ‘Music, Fashion, Film’

“Magic Metal Montana” joins a pantheon of highly literal, highly endearing Charli xcx songs. Whereas so much of pop music today is mired in innuendo and cleverness, Charli is often at her best when eschewing any and all cheekiness and going straight for the sweat-soaked jugular.

On “Magic,” Charli XCX writes a song about her friendship and enduring collaboration with producer A.G. Cook. She details their creative connection (“We make music, we talk that way”), as well as smaller details about his taste (“You like old things, magic, metal and Montana”) and their shared commonality as “only [children].” There is little to analyze in these straightforward words, but much to emotionally react to, as she directly recounts their friendship and co-creativity.

The entire song, though, is colored by its most striking line: “I’d cry if you died,” she sings in a scraggly vocal fry before moving into something more soaring. The line immediately brings to mind SOPHIE, whose tragic 2021 passing created an irreplaceable vacuum in contemporary pop and in Charli’s own micro-scene. With the line about SOPHIE, the song, a simple, guitar-driven ode to A.G., takes on new emotional textures, becoming both a sincere appreciation of a central confidante, and an anxious expression about impermanence.

If Brat was about the self, how it shifts and shatters when trapped in the thrall of others’ perceptions, or when the realities of the perpetual party rub up against new desires, then this new album is about the experience of existing in community. Here that community is composed of friends and collaborators, namely A.G Cook and Finn Keane who she made the record with. She paints a picture of this group by relaying the day-to-day of their art-making, and there’s a quotidian quality to the music that is, compared to Charli’s last full-length, quite quaint. But deeper more looming concerns, like death, still hover.

With that, this almost diaristic portrait of her friendship with A.G. is both a straightforward look at an enduring relationship, and a more broad mediation on friendship itself. Overall, it’s just very, very sweet.