Charli XCX review, How I’m Feeling Now: A brash, adventurous lockdown album

Written and recorded from scratch over the past six weeks, this album is a high-voltage assault on the senses

Over the past 10 years, Charli XCX has developed a ‘one for me, one of them’ attitude to popstardom (Getty)

Charli XCX is scrawling lyrics on a piece of paper with a Sharpie, singing as she goes. “Front of my mind… front of my…” She stops, then tries going up an octave. “Front of my mind. F***. I’ve forgotten how the f***ing melody goes.”

This is how the 27-year-old created her new album – from scratch, over six weeks of lockdown, in front of her fans on Instagram Live. She’d ask for feedback and adjust accordingly; show us songs in their skeletal states; and swear a lot. She used only the “tools I have at my fingertips”, which meant throwing everything at the wall and then throwing that wall into a synthesiser. The resulting album, How I’m Feeling Now, is a high-voltage assault on the senses – an entrepreneurial experiment that fits her avant-garde spirit.

Over the past 10 years, XCX has developed a sort of “one for me, one of them” attitude to popstardom, dancing on the edge of mainstream one moment (“Boom Clap”, “Fancy”, “1999”, her Christine and the Queens collaboration “Gone”) and plunging underground the next, as she did in 2017 with cult mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. How I’m Feeling Now falls into the latter camp: brash, uninhibited, adventurous.

“Forever”, the track she momentarily forgot “the f***ing melody” to, is a psychedelic cocktail, mixing the layered autotune of Imogen Heap with peppy Taylor Swift-like hooks. On “Pink Diamond”, she sings in a laidback RP drawl as the music shudders and quakes around her, as though a dozen first-person fighting games are being played at once. “Boom Clap” this ain’t.

Some of the lyrics feel, er, rushed – “Hello hello hello, I see you clearly,” she sings over computerised strings on “7 Years”, “It’s really, really, really, really nice.” But others evoke the paradoxical climbing-up-the-walls ennui of quarantine. On “Anthems”, an infectious, industrial convulsion, she trawls through her day: “Eat some cereal/ Try my best to be physical/ Lose myself to a video/ Staring out to oblivion/ All my friends are invisible.”

“Detonate” is a gentler affair, a dreamy, marimba-esque soundtrack to self-doubt: “I don’t trust myself alone/ Why should you love me?”

The final track, “Visions”, descends into sirens and frenetic, pulsating beats. Listening to it feels like fleeing from a warehouse rave. Just like lockdown itself, How I’m Feeling Now can be overwhelming – panic-inducing, even – when taken as a whole. But there are snatches of brilliance here, and as perhaps the very first album to be produced under lockdown, it is really quite an achievement.