Charli xcx will release her seventh album 'Music, Fashion, Film' on July 24

Charli xcx has locked a date and a shape for the record that follows BRAT. "Music, Fashion, Film," her seventh studio album, arrives July 24. It holds 11 tracks and runs 30 minutes and five seconds, tight for a modern pop rollout and close to the length of BRAT itself. She is not stretching this one to fill a streaming quota.

Three singles are already out. "Rock Music" arrived May 8, "SS26" followed on May 27, and "Wink Wink" dropped June 26. The first two are built on real guitar, which is the news inside the news. After two years of BRAT running on club synths and A.G. Cook's blown-out production, "Rock Music" opens on a riff and a sneer instead of a four-on-the-floor kick. The texture moves. The attitude stays put.

A.G. Cook and Finn Keane handled most of the production, the same pair at the center of BRAT and its remix record. Charli tends to do her sharpest work when she keeps the production circle small and lets the ideas get stranger inside it. That is the PC Music habit she came up on, and it has held through every reinvention since.

The cover is the thesis

She made the loudest statement on this album before releasing a note of it. The sleeve, shot in black and white by Aidan Zamiri, sits three men in a plain kitchen: John Cale of the Velvet Underground for music, Marc Jacobs for fashion, Martin Scorsese for film. One figure per word of the title. Zamiri directed "The Moment," the mockumentary Charli premiered at Sundance earlier this year, so the image reads as one more room in a visual world she has been building on screen as well as on record.

Where it lands

BRAT was the kind of album that leaks out of music and into everything else: a color, a meme format, a campaign look. The obvious move after a record that size is to run it back. A 30-minute album led by guitars, wrapped in an art-house photo of three men in their seventies, is the opposite instinct. Charli would rather change the subject than photocopy it. Whether the songs carry that swagger is the July 24 question, but the three singles say she is pushing at the sound instead of resting on the one that worked.