After spending over a decade pushing pop forward from its periphery, Charli xcx seized the zeitgeist in 2024 with Brat. The Grammy-­winning album propelled her to arena headliner for the first time — and now the 34-year-old is filling those same rooms and topping festival bills in support of her July rock-infused album, Music, Fashion, Film.

For the tour, which wraps its North America leg in October and heads to Europe in February, she’s still doing things her way, with an uncompromising, high-concept show that leans heavily on Brat and Music. “I’m not really performing to please anyone other than myself,” she says, “which is maybe not the attitude that everybody takes, but that’s the attitude that I take.”

You debuted this show while headlining Chicago’s Lollapalooza for the first time. How intimidating was that?

That was so wild, to be honest, and really exciting. I think there’s that sort of inner battle to fight this voice of what people might want from you versus the kind of artistic vision of what’s true to the album, and luckily that voice never got too loud. There was a world where I could have played songs from my catalog that everybody definitely knows — but I am not really that interested in doing that anymore. Especially a festival headline set, I like to use that as an opportunity to really put forward my most pure vision as an artist. Maybe that is something that not everybody will like. Maybe that’s something that new people will discover. But I [wanted] to use it as an opportunity to challenge an audience and the idea of what a festival set can be.

How does touring allow you to express a side of your creativity that you can’t in the studio?

For this show in particular, we really wanted to make things feel as cinematic as we possibly could, whilst obviously understanding the parameters of being in an arena. Being in an arena, you can make things feel really maximalist. You can throw all of the toys [at an audience] right away. But I think what we’ve done with the show is we’ve practiced some restraint, so that when you do feel that moment of pyro, it stands out.

Was there something with this show that you had always wanted to do but hadn’t previously been able to pull off?

Yeah, like, the whole thing. [Laughs.] As an artist, I’ve really climbed my way up from nothing — I used to perform with an iPod on a makeshift stage, and that was my production. The thing that’s interesting is every time you get closer to doing your dream show, you realize that, actually, it’s worth putting the money back in rather than like taking the money and running, because I want to do a show that feels artistically challenging. I feel challenged. I hope people who watch it feel challenged at points too.

Putting on a show of this scale takes a village. How did your creative team support you?

I’ve worked closely with [creative director] Imogene Strauss, who is essentially one of my best friends, on building numerous tours of mine. She knows what I mean, I know what she means. We have a linguistic shorthand where we can just get to the core of an idea really fast. I have a similar language with [producer] A. G. Cook in the studio. Working on the musical direction of the show is really important too, and that’s something that I start months and months in advance with Mitchell Snyder, who is someone who I’ve worked on my shows with for a long time. It’s almost like making a remix album, using all of the stems, deciding where we’re putting “oblivion is freedom,” deciding that we’re even doing that, starting from nothing. The choreo on this show was really, really important, too. I worked with Eric Christensen, who has done a lot of runway-related work in the past, he works a lot with Mugler, I’ve worked with him before with Saint Laurent when he was doing movement direction on a photo shoot. I really wanted to work with someone who had an extensive fashion background and was doing shows and was understanding the variety of different walks.

The Music, Fashion, Film artwork features the luminaries John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. Were there any tours or musicians who inspired this tour’s creative direction?

It wasn’t really tours. It was more, like, different tableaux, different paintings. Like, Caravaggio paintings have always been quite important to me. There’s like a real rawness to them. The way that he’s using kind of untraditional models to paint real people. Then just like the energy of the performance, I was thinking a lot about people like [actress] Béatrice Dalle, and how she’s so strong. I don’t actually go to that many live shows to be honest.

A David Cronenberg monologue ends ­Music, Fashion, Film, and one line — ­“oblivion is freedom” — recurs throughout the show. Why that specific line?

It’s the part that’s most related to how I feel about performance, for better and worse. For me, performing live is very physical, sometimes very painful. I just have to throw myself into it and lose my inhibitions and almost enter another state — which might sound pretentious to some people, but whatever. I have to lose myself to be able to feel free onstage, and so “oblivion is freedom” was the perfect thing to pepper across the live show, because it’s genuinely how I feel when I perform and it’s the mission statement of the album, in a way. Destroying what is comfortable and what you know can sometimes lead to this new creative freedom.

How do you view the totality of the show?

It’s my perspective on being an artist, yes, but also being human. Not to get too deep — I know that, for some people, it’s just a pop show, and I’m happy for people to enjoy it like that — but I think there is a chaos and a freedom and a sadness and a beauty to existence, and I suppose I’m trying to put all that into this one show. I think I have been a walking contradiction throughout my life as an artist, but I think that that is what it is to be human. It can be about whatever it can be to other people. But for me, it’s kind of about that.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Oct. 3, 2026, issue of Billboard.