how i’m feeling now is a claustrophobic revelation
“I go hard, I go fast, and I never look back,” Charli XCX emphasized at the very beginning of her last album, Charli, which dropped just eight months ago. This unerring, machine-like drive — one that’s established her as one of the most prolific pop artists of our generation — resurfaces almost immediately at the top of how i’m feeling now, her new album, released this morning. “I just wanna go real hard,” she deadpans in front of a webcam on “pink diamond,” wrapped in a thicket of wonky synths sculpted by Dijon and A. G. Cook. She keeps repeating the line, drained but persistent, almost as if she has to insist on it.