When you were interested in playing with artifice and trying on different personas, was that ever psychologically destabilizing? Absolutely. At a certain point, I just completely lost touch with reality. I was falling so deeply into the fantasy of my artwork and my stage persona that I lost touch. I wouldn’t say that falling deeper into a life of... See more

In their own way, that’s what Jeff Tweedy’s songs are usually trying to do, too. They can be beautiful but they’ve also got those holes, those scars, those gaping wrecking-ball dents, all of which speak to the immense difficulty but absolute necessity of trying to make anything beautiful at all. They let off firecracker blasts that illuminate the... See more

While recent albums from Dua Lipa, Grande and Lorde treated self-care and introspection as a kind of therapeutic salvation, Charli shifted hard into goblin mode, unfurling a litany of barely euphemistic drug references and proudly owning her messiest contradictions. (