“I’m gonna crash, come watch me” sings Charli XCX on the title track of her fifth album, Crash. It’s the biggest, plushest, most mainstream release to date from the shy Essex music nerd turned hot LA diva. And while some fans may miss the 29-year-old’s quirkier sonic experiments, there’s no denying Charlotte Aitchison’s ability to pump out enough relentlessly solid and sexy hooks to secure herself a place at pop’s top table… or dancing on top of it.
Explaining the “high-voltage, self-destructive” poses she strikes throughout these 12, sleekly structured songs, Aitchison has said that Crash was inspired by David Cronenberg’s 1996 psychological thriller of the same name. Based on JG Ballard’s 1973 novel, the film follows characters who are sexually aroused by car accidents, exploring “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”. Although Ballard had little interest in music (he never owned a record player), his seductive dystopian fiction inspired many British bands of the Seventies and Eighties, as they experimented with the ways electronic music could be used to express human emotions.
