Charli xcx performs at Scotiabank Arena, part of her tour in support of her seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film on Sept. 21.Henry Redcliffe/Supplied
At the end of her 90-minute spectacle of pulsing hyper-pop and industrialized, rave-ready rock experimentations at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Monday, the British superstar Charli xcx spoke to the audience before the final song, No One Lasts Forever.
She began with a shout-out to a Canadian octogenarian filmmaker, “Mr. David Cronenberg,” whose voiceover is featured prominently on the track that also closes her new album, Music, Fashion, Film. In 2025, she travelled to Toronto to record a conversation with the shock auteur.
“It’s the last thing I did for this album, it kind of completed the whole thing,” she explained, describing No One Lasts Forever as the most important song on the album and a “mission statement of how I feel.”
The song and the album are the 34-year-old’s reaction to the zeitgeist level of fame caused by the success of her 2024 LP Brat. Transcending the music world, brat was a flash cultural movement officially deemed by Collins English Dictionary as 2024’s word of the year, redefined as someone with an independent and hedonistic attitude.
“I don’t wanna go home, now I’m more confident than ever,” she sang on the synth-popped No One Lasts Forever in front of the electrified crowd. “Since everyone knows my name, all the parties got better.”
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Parties and fame end. Even concerts have curfews. The Scotiabank show closed with the recorded words of Cronenberg on legacies repeated like a mantra: “They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”
Charli and her troupe of female dancers posed as a bunch, frozen in place as Cronenberg’s phrase “Oblivion is freedom” was shown on the large video screens flanking the stage. The idea is that there is liberation in the acceptance that we’ll all be unremembered eventually.
Which doesn’t mean this concert will be forgotten anytime soon. Banger after banger, relentless visually and sonically, in front a largely female audience, dressed like their idol in short skirts or shorts with fancy stockings. There hasn’t been this much fishnet in one place since Canada’s cod fishing collapse in 1992.
Charli xcx's brash sounds, charismatic audacity and controlled chaos are state of the art, writes Wheeler.Henry Redcliffe/Supplied
The star attraction initially appeared all in black leather. The motocore fashion gave way to other self-confident styles that were more trashy than flashy. The stage was stark, dark and blocky, with diminishing tiers stacked toward the rafters. The lighting was minimalist.
Despite the last name xcx, the singer is not Roman. She was born Charlotte Emma Aitchison, the daughter of a Scottish businessman and a Gujarati Indian nurse and flight attendant. Her first (and highest) charting single in Canada was Boom Clap in 2014. The name of her 2022 album Crash was inspired by the 1996 Cronenberg film of the same name.
In this month’s Rolling Stone magazine, the often breathless music critic Rob Sheffield declared Olivia Rodrigo the “best arena rock act in years.” The assertion already seems dated. Brat has entered the chat.
The show began with the jagged Rock Music, a winking − sarcastic, even − jump into the genre. Charli’s take on rock could be described as post-Strokes. Her three-piece band at least looked the part.
The line “I’m really banging my head, I’m really hurting my neck, the nerve damage is real” is authentic. Charli’s energetic stage performances take a toll. As for the chorus – “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music” – that is cheeky and not to be taken literally.
The band appeared off and on throughout the evening, replaced by Charli’s more familiar modus operandi: auto-tuned vocals accompanied by backing tracks. The 2013 song Grins was performed live for the first time in years. During the Brat-era electroclash hit Guess, canons flung underwear into the air instead of confetti.
Cronenberg once said that we’re all mad scientists with life as our labs: “We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.”
Some experiments are more interesting than others. Like visionaries Madonna and Lady Gaga, Charli xcx wets her finger, sticks it in the air − and ignores the wind’s direction. Her brash sounds, charismatic audacity and controlled chaos are state of the art.
For now.