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Charli XCX Admits Her Last Album Was Full Of 'Vanilla' Songs She 'Would Never Listen To'

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After releasing an album full of music she wouldn't listen to, Charli XCX is over playing it safe.

"I kinda miss the time when pop music was really volatile and crazy," Charli, 31, told The Face in an interview published Monday, February 19. "I miss the Paris Hilton days. Everybody is so worried about everything right now, how they're perceived if this art they've created is going to offend anyone. It limits creative output to think like that. I'm also just into this idea of lying all the time. Being really truthful, but also lying. F—k it!"

Charli is also being honest about her last album, 2022's Crash. Her fifth album was Charli's attempt to make a commercially viable record, per The Face. While it was a moderate success both commercially and critically, she doesn't want to put out any more "vanilla palatable flatness" into the pop world.

"There were songs on Crash that I would never listen to," she says, citing her song "Yuck" as an example. "I needed to switch after Crash — I wasn't born to do radio liners," she said. "That's not who I am at all."

Charli XCX and The 1975's George Daniel went from musical collaborators to a Hollywood love story. The duo met when working together on the March 2021 song "Spinning." Daniel also assisted the "Boom Clap" singer with various songs on her Crash album, which was released in March 2022. Dating rumors were sparked soon after, and […]

Charli explained what will be on her next album (its working title is XCX6). There will be "irresistible club-pop made by a dyed-in-the-wool party girl," with music so "brazen" that it will demolish Crash. "[I'm] over this idea of metaphor and beauty in art — I just want directness from me," she told The Face. "I want things to feel quick and fast and dirty."

The next album will be Charli's "most aggressive and confrontational" record, adding that she's prepared for people to "think I'm a bitch, but I'm not that." The Face also notes that XCX6 will have a song about a strained relationship she has with an unnamed female artist, which will likely cause a reaction online.

On top of that, XCX6 will also explore society's "fascination with mean girls" and why "succubus-looking, dead-eyed women" like herself are coded as mean.

That's hot! Paris Hilton has had no shortage of experience in the dating world, romancing musicians, actors and businessmen before walking down the aisle in November 2021. The Simple Life alum's relationship with Jason Shaw made headlines in the early 2000s after the duo called off their one-year engagement in 2003. Two years later, Hilton's […]

"I get tired of behaving in a way that people expect me, or expect pop stars, to behave. I'm not a role model — and I never did this because I wanted to be," she said, adding that she understands that it "comes with the territory" of being famous. Instead, Charli aims to be a role model for "a very flawed, genuinely real, non-perfect person."

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Charli's next album will also explore her grief over SOPHIE, the Scottish music producer who died after an accidental fall in January 2021. Charli dedicated Crash to SOPHIE and told The Face that though the late hyperpop pioneer "believed in me in ways that I didn't believe [in] myself," she felt distant from SOPHIE "because I was in awe of her and wanted to impress her."

"I didn't feel like I was magical enough for this unbelievably magic person," she said. "And that makes me ashamed now I don't have the opportunity to experience that anymore because she's gone."

It's 2024 And Beyoncé Is Still In The Middle Of A Kanye West Vs. Swiftie Fight

Culture has become nothing but a giant ouroboros as of late. Just this year, we're repeating the same Super Bowl matchup, presidential ballot, and Sarah Palin press tour as we did in 2020, but the loop goes back so much further than that. It's been 15 years since the infamous VMA ceremony where Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift to praise Beyoncé, but the two rivals are still fighting. AndBeyoncé, through absolutely no fault of her own, is still right in the middle of it.

At long last (derogatory), Kanye's newest album, Vultures 1, dropped this past weekend following numerous delays, transparent apologies, and backlash from other artists over unapproved samples. There's more than enough to be angry about if you're brave enough to actually dig into the album; Chris Brown shows up on a song to ask people to "beg forgiveness" of him, for example.

But Swifties, who've hated Kanye for over a decade now, would likely boycott the album regardless of Brown's presence or even the relatively more recent revelations of West's antisemitism and general awfulness. Remember, the rapper was also the one who kicked off Swift's Reputation era by rapping "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/I made that bitch famous" on his 2016 track, "Famous." The whole relationship between the two artists (and their fans) is a giant wasp nest that Ye, if he knew what was good for him at all, would do better to never poke again. But West famously doesn't know what's good for him and poke he did, writing "I mean since Taylor Swift/since I had the Rollie on my wrist/I'm the new Jesus, bitch" on just-released track, "Carnival."

In response to the line and the album's general existence, the Swifties kicked into action, as they are wont to do. "SWIFTIE EMERGENCY," one widely-shared post began, mobilizing the veritable army to stream Swiftie ally Beyoncé's new single, "Texas Hold 'Em," to keep Kanye off the charts. But West, never one to just shut up when it would really behoove him to do so, poked the nest again, reposting the Swiftie battle cry on Instagram with a long caption of his own, written in a series of all-caps couplets.

"WHEN I SAID THAT I'M THE NEW JESUS BITCH I WASN'T EVEN THINKING ABOUT TAYLOR SWIFT," West wrote, thanking Swift's fans for the "FREE PROMO" and claiming that "THIS ALBUM IS ACTUALLY SUPER POSITIVE AND FUN." (We'll see who comes out on top on Billboard's Hot 100 next week.)

West's post goes on to claim that he was on Swift's side when Scooter Braun bought her masters (the event that led to the singer's current Taylor's Version re-record project), that "SHE AND BEYONCÉ ARE BIG INSPIRATIONS TO ALL MUSICIANS," and that he's sure he's helped Swift's career more than harmed it. He also shut down a persistent rumor from earlier in the week that Swift had somehow gotten him kicked out of the Super Bowl, clarifying that he had just gone with his wife, Bianca Censori, to a different box. But while all of this is surprisingly cordial language from the rapper, the world hasn't turned upside down completely. "TO ALL TAYLOR SWIFT FANS I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY UUUM IM NOT YOUR FRIEND EITHER THOUGH LOL," he wrote.

Elsewhere in the very long post, West complains that he's been banned from hotels, companies, and restaurants (failing to mention that it's all been because of his antisemitism, of course), asks Shaq to hang out for some reason, and says the fact that Vultures 1 was removed from streaming platforms quickly after it was released was "TO LIMIT OUR FIRST WEEK NUMBERS" and that it "REMINDS ME OF THE MISTREATMENT OF MY PEOPLE BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF OUR SKIN."

We can't, of course, speak to whether or not this is actually what Vultures 1's short life on Apple Music and iTunes reminded West of, but the reason behind its removal is far less of a conspiracy than the rapper is suggesting. The album was pulled off the two streamers Thursday morning (although a few singles still remain) because, according to label distribution platform FUGA (via Billboard), it was never supposed to be released in the first place. "Late last year, FUGA was presented with the opportunity to release Vultures 1. Exercising our judgment in the ordinary course of business, we declined to do so," said a representative for the platform in a statement. "On Friday, February 9, 2024, a long-standing FUGA client delivered the album Vultures 1 through the platform's automated processes, violating our service agreement. Therefore, FUGA is actively working with its DSP partners and the client to remove Vultures 1 from our systems." As of this writing, Vultures 1 has not yet been pulled off of Spotify, Amazon, or YouTube Music.

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Kanye West's Next Album Will Be The Most Important Of His Career

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On Sunday night, Czech paparazzi site Profimedia photographed Kanye West entering his office in Calabasas, California with Rick Rubin, who served as executive producer on the rapper's last two albums, 2013's Yeezus and 2016's The Life of Pablo. This comes just weeks after West and his wife, Kim Kardashian West, were spotted in the Wyoming mountains alongside Kid Cudi, Nas, Travis Scott, The-Dream and producer Mike Dean, among others. West has supposedly been hard at work on his Pablo follow-up — which may or may not be titled Turbo Grafx 16 — for nearly two years now, and after his recent meet-up with Rubin, one could reasonably infer that his new project is finally approaching completion.

Granted, West is a painstaking perfectionist and excessive tinkerer, so even if he's almost finished with his next album, it might not see the light of day for several months. (Still, one astute Reddit user reasoned, "You don't bring your aunt to the studio to listen to something half finished. You bring her to the studio to show her your nearly complete masterpiece.") By all means,

Ever since he dropped his debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004, West has thrived in the face of adversity. He nearly singlehandedly shifted the tide of hip-hop with his first trilogy of albums — Dropout, 2005's Late Registration and 2007's Graduation — pivoting away from the gritty, chest-beating gangsta rap of the early 2000s in lieu of a more confessional, pop-friendly approach that incorporated equal helpings of classic soul samplings and arena rock largesse. He upended preexisting stereotypes about how the genre should look and sound, and he cemented his revolutionary status when Graduation famously outsold 50 Cent's Curtis by more than a quarter-million copies in both albums' debut week (957,000 vs. 691,000).

West reinvented himself yet again on his chart-topping fourth album, 2008's 808s & Heartbreak, which further blurred the line between pop and rap with its chilly, minimalist production and tortured Auto-Tuned singing. Inspired by the death of his mother, Donda West, the dissolution of his relationship with fiancée Alexis Phifer and the crushing loneliness of superstardom, West released an album that initially polarized fans and critics, but has since been reevaluated as a cornerstone of modern hip-hop. 808s inspired a new wave of sensitive, introspective rappers who deftly straddle the divide between rap and pop, from Drake to Childish Gambino to Frank Ocean to Lil Uzi Vert.

After a virtually unparalleled string of critically acclaimed and commercially successful albums, West ruled the rap roost in 2009. Then the VMAs happened. West drunkenly stormed the stage and interrupted Taylor Swift as she accepted her award for Best Female Video and asserted that Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" should have won, calling it "one of the best videos of all time." The backlash was swift and unrelenting: West was withdrawn from the remainder of the show, and his co-headlining tour with Lady Gaga was subsequently canceled. In an off-the-record portion of a CNBC interview, President Barack Obama called West a "jackass," an insult heard 'round the world after ABC's Terry Moran tweeted it.

West became a music industry pariah after the VMAs debacle, and he retreated to Oahu, Hawaii for a "self-imposed exile" to work on his next album. He quickly earned back the good graces of fans and critics with 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a maximalist, genre-spanning opus that scoured the depths of West's tortured psyche and featured a star-studded list of collaborators (Jay-Z, Rihanna, Rick Ross, John Legend, Nicki Minaj) on some of his greatest singles to date, including "Power," "Runaway" and "All of the Lights." Fantasy became West's fourth chart-topping album, earned perfect scores from several music publications including Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, and has since appeared on several "greatest albums of all time" lists. West was no longer just the defining rapper of his era; he was considered one of the most innovative artists of all time.

If My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy further highlighted West's unmatched genius, it also effectively ended the first phase of his musical career. He released five groundbreaking, era-defining albums in his first six years, but he took nearly three years to follow up Fantasy with the minimalist Yeezus. The 10-track album, released without artwork, clocked in at a lean 40 minutes, contrasting the studied grandiosity of Fantasy with abrasive industrialism and off-the-wall punchlines. For the first time in his career, West was looking to younger players in the rap game for inspiration, putting his own spin on the nihilistic punk-rap of Death Grips and the lacerating humor of Odd Future. West willfully relinquished his hip-hop throne in the process, going so far as to call Yeezus as a "protest to music."

Yet if West considered Yeezus a protest to music, then his last album, The Life of Pablo, was a protest to the entire music industry. West first released an incomplete version of the album exclusively through Tidal on Feb. 14, 2016, saying it would become available on other platforms the following week and then promptly retracting his promise. Pablo racked up 400 million streams on Tidal in its first month-and-a-half of release before an updated version went live on other major streaming services on April 1, 2016. The album presented a smorgasbord of genres and sonic textures, often feeling like an intentionally messy soundscape rather than a collection of fully realized songs. First single "Famous" added more fuel to his volatile relationship with Swift with the lyric, "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous."

West has since tinkered with several tracks, uploading new mixes and adding an additional track, "Saint Pablo," two months after the album's official release. The Life of Pablo debuted atop the Billboard 200 albums chart in April 2016, becoming the first chart-topper to generate the majority of its units (70%) from streaming equivalent albums. But more important than its commercial success, West's seventh album rewrote the definition of an "album." No longer a static collection of songs outside the creator's control upon release, an album is now "a living breathing changing creative expression," as West described Pablo.

The promotional cycle behind The Life of Pablo did not treat West kindly, however. The rapper postponed several dates of his Saint Pablo Tour after Kardashian was robbed in Paris in October 2016, and he canceled the remainder of the trek altogether the following month. The cancellation followed West's meeting with President-elect Donald Trump; he expressed his support for Trump during a mid-show rant while also criticizing Jay Z and Beyoncé. West was later admitted to UCLA Medical Center on a psychiatric hold.

In the fallout from the Saint Pablo Tour, West has largely evaded the public eye, and little is known about the musical direction his next project will take. West's two-year musical gap, reclusive recording conditions and lingering Swift controversy recall the circumstances that yielded My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and eight years later, he's at a similar crossroads in his career. He could very well announce his return to the music industry with an immediately accessible, star-studded album that sells a zillion copies, earns lavish praise from critics and puts him back at the top of the rap game.

But he could just as reasonably drop his most avant-garde work to date, something that can only be listened to under specific physical and mental circumstances. Perhaps the album will include a virtual reality component; maybe it will only appear on streaming services when the sun is out; different songs could become available based on the listener's location. If this sounds absurd, consider that I'm talking about a man whose Yeezus Tour featured two mountains across which a devil, a white Jesus and numerous backup dancers in nude bodysuits frolicked as West rapped through a bejeweled Martin Magiela mask. Nothing is off limits.

It's this unpredictability, along with West's near-spotless musical track record, that makes the prospect of a new album so exciting. The hip-hop landscape has changed dramatically in the two years since West released The Life of Pablo, as tent-pole albums from Kendrick Lamar and Drake jockey for space alongside the latest releases from SoundCloud rappers like Lil Pump and XXXTentacion. West has doubtless been watching and listening to all of these developments, likely incorporating some of these sounds and aesthetics into his own work.

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