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This Week’s Stories

The secret history of Charli XCX’s Brat

Charli XCX’s excx-ellent new album Brat is probably the most talked-about album in music right now, a striking return to form from an artist who has refused to stay in one place very long anyway. But it also seems to directly evoke her mythic, never-released third LP, XCX World. Originally recorded in 2016 as a collaboration with the late electronic musician Sophie, and strongly evocative of the hyperpop music of that era, XCX World was plasticky, upbeat, experimental, and hedonistic — a striking lunge into the avant garde early in Charli’s career. 

After it was leaked, the album was scrapped, as Charli has suggested, by her label. She continued to buck against label constraints and the very concept of mainstream pop music  throughout her 5-album Atlantic deal, climaxing with the release of 2022’s major pop play Crash. In the years since, she’s distanced herself from that record, coyly asked for a link to XCX World on Twitter, played the LP before shows, and finally, with Brat, penned a sort of spiritual sequel to it, updating its themes and ideas and including a direct, and shattering, ode to Sophie. It’s a skeleton key for better understanding the artist’s career, as well as the way her new album feels simultaneously like a leap forward and a homecoming. 

More from XCX World: 

The only good AI art is bad AI art

AI has already threatened our most accomplished artists; now it has begun to threaten our least accomplished. A new “crappy MSPaint” workflow posted on Reddit’s Stable Diffusion board shows that not even doodling is safe from the impersonations of AI. It’s the latest in a series of AI scribbling and sketching tools:

The MSPaint workflow is an alarmingly close translation of the wobbly, expressive feel of an image traced by a human-held mouse. Soon after marveling at this creation, the subreddit collapsed into drama over Wednesday’s release of Stable Diffusion 3, which is creating less intentional mutations.

More slime:

Hollywood finally understands video games

The horror-flick goliath Blumhouse productions revealed their first slate of video games last weekend, and, while your response to them will probably vary depending on how in the bag you already are for low-stakes horror stuff, it marks an impressive entry to the medium. With titles ranging from the beginner-friendly Fear The Spotlight to the meta Simulation, they seem based on a canny understanding that one of the primary vehicles for horror consumption today is watching streamers play indie horror games. Rather than paying a kingly sum for the next Five Nights At Freddy’s, Blumhouse seems to be gambling that they can grow it on their own. 

Hollywood has legendarily misunderstood games, retrofitting mechanics into bizarre live-action adaptations (see: Doom, Prince Of Persia, Max Payne). But Blumhouse follows the games-first mentality of Annapurna studios, whose interactive imprint has quietly become a seal of quality in the indie-game space, rather than A24, who is taking a typically auteurish bent by collaboration with Hideo Kojima on a Death Stranding adaptation. Perhaps the most promising upcoming output from any of them is Blumhouse’s own Project C, a collaboration between interactive-film wunderkind Sam Barlow and yes-David’s-son Brandon Cronenberg.

More horror: 

We ate the tape on E3

One strange annual tradition of the video-game universe is the flood of trailers released over the course of the first week or so of June. This year, some 15 hours of conferences unveiled 100+ new promotional clips of games. We dug through the piles of hero shooters and cozy games to find a few titles that stood out:

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Z, Playmaker, Vol. 2

I have to cite my sources on this one: the rap critic Paul Thompson declared Z’s Playmaker, Vol. 2 “mixtape of the year” on X, which was good enough for me to give it a spin, and it hasn’t left my rotation since. This is a grassroots effort — the mixtape has, at present, single-digit listens on YouTube — but it’s a phenomenal LP, Z’s textured rhymes toying with dozens of different hooks as the beats warp and shift beneath his flow. While Z’s diction and playful storytelling nod to indie rap, the only thing in this backpack is a truly absurd quantity of basketball references. With repeat listens, that album title starts to seem load-bearing. Here is an almost conceptual record about the the idea of bouncing back, of tossing a dime as cleanly as you could’ve before the ankle injury. Mavs in 7. [Clayton]

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