When Mood Boards Became Art: What Charli XCX Got Right and Wrong

When 33-year-old British dance-pop sensation Charli XCX finally achieved mainstream success with her 2024 album Brat, her take on artistry was surprisingly blunt: "Music is not important." The modern artist's job, she declared, is to create a "world"—to project a vision across various media platforms.

This statement perfectly encapsulates what might be the 21st century's most influential creative format: the mood board. Originally tools for graphic designers and ad executives, mood boards—collages of magazine clippings, movie stills, headlines—have evolved through Instagram and Pinterest into how ordinary people "curate" their lives. Gen Z now hunts for the next "rare aesthetic," any combination of images and sounds that makes the brain sizzle in a nostalgic, cool way.

But as Charli's recent ventures into film and soundtrack work demonstrate, there's a crucial difference between assembling references and creating lasting art.

The Mood Board Queen's Rise

Charli XCX embodies mood-board chic perfectly. Fans praise her "je ne sais quoi" while simultaneously cataloging exactly what makes her distinctive: fried black hair, chalky nocturnal complexion, cigarettes, auto-tune, and Brat's piercing neon green.

Throughout the 2010s, she cunningly blended archetypes—part Britney Spears, part Siouxsie Sioux, part guerrilla marketing exec. She sang stuttering hooks over beats by idiosyncratic producers and did fascinating online experiments, like livestreaming album creation during the early pandemic. Brat was conceived title-first, before any music existed.

What fans truly loved wasn't just her aesthetic curation but how her taste was backed by genuine craft. Her production spiced up 2000s rave-pop with hints of children's music in brain-sizzling ways. She wrote Brat's lyrics like text messages to friends, x-raying her self-doubting, irrepressibly romantic psyche. The album's remix series pushed the era into transcendence—projecting herself as queen of a coked-up dance party while revealing something complex about social life.

The Expansion Experiment

Following Brat's success, Charli is extending her brand into new territory. She's appearing in at least seven films and produced The Moment, a mockumentary about the Brat era. She's also recorded the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell's eye-popping take on Wuthering Heights.

The Moment follows movie-Charli trying to maintain "Bratmentum" as long as possible. Influencer Kylie Jenner counsels her: "The second people are getting sick of you, that's when you have to go even harder." Going harder means cutting deals—the film pushes this to parody by having her endorse a Brat-colored credit card for young LGBTQ consumers.

The film presents a fascinating clash of mood boards. Her longtime creative director Celeste envisions harsh minimalism—black-and-white strobe lights and profane on-screen text. Hack director Johannes (played by Alexander Skarsgård) pushes colorful girl-power complete with corny props, trying to make Charli more like Taylor Swift.

This sets up rich material about artistic integrity versus commercial success. The film suggests Charli's true artistry isn't bound by linear narrative structures—it's all about sensation. But then why make a narrative film at all?

When Vibes Replace Execution

The Moment attempts to meet film's structural needs but feels much more passionate about its look than its screenplay. Director Aidan Zamiri assembles a twitchy bricolage mixing This Is Spinal Tap with Harmony Korine, but the result is a comedy with almost no effective jokes, listless pacing, and cinematography that's stylized but not actually stylish.

It feels rushed and underdeveloped—the product of too many deadlines, too little patience, or simply the belief that vibes matter more than execution.

The Wuthering Heights soundtrack shows more promise. Unlike Brat's ebullience, it's sullen and stately, built on strings and droning electronics. Lead single "House" opens with Velvet Underground'sJohn Cale delivering spoken-word poetry before distorted guitar creates a satisfying jump-scare effect. "Chains of Love" showcases Charli twisting a plaintive chorus into windswept shapes with her trusty auto-tune.

But the rest feels like a first draft of "elegant and brutal." The lyrics string together repetitive metaphors comparing love to death and commitment to confinement. She sings of dying in fires and having her face smashed into stone, but the music drizzles grayly upon the passion she describes.

The Speed Trap

Charli's creative philosophy echoes how marketers and influencers talk. In our oversaturated media environment, the common playbook for success is constant visibility—posting and provoking daily, touting micro-reinventions to maintain audience attention. The mood-board mentality facilitates this need for speed: assemble reference points, add personality, and voilà—a new moment.

But great music transcends moments. While referential borrowing, high-concept brainstorming, and first-thought-best-thought immediacy drove many classic artists' work, their greatest pieces required revision, editing, collaboration, second-guessing, dark nights of the soul, and time.

Charli may feel culture moves too quickly for the months or years needed to convert ideas into excellence. She may fear we have no patience for masterpieces. But the truth is that masterpieces are all we have patience for.