Charli xcx wants you to know that making a movie is not glamorous. The video for “Camera,” out Tuesday (July 21), puts French actor Vincent Cassel through a miserable shoot while Charli, nominally the director, rides the camera along a dolly track, Rolling Stone reports.
Directed by Aidan Zamiri, her frequent collaborator and the director of The Moment, the black-and-white clip follows Cassel as he tries to film a climactic desert shootout on a set where things keep going wrong. In the first take his squib fails; in the second it explodes in a gush of fake blood, but an overheated light throws sparks and ruins the shot, per Rolling Stone. Billboard says Cassel takes a couple of shots to the chest, fake blood oozing from his mouth, while Charli orders the cast and crew around. The whole thing is a “one-er,” a single continuous take with no cuts.
The song is about wanting a more dangerous life. “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck,” she sings, per Billboard, “I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous.” She performed it at her underplay shows in New York and London earlier in July.
Why it matters
“Camera” is the fourth single from Music, Fashion, Film, following “Rock Music,” “SS26” and “Wink Wink,” and the video completes a rollout built around the album's three nouns. The rest of the 11-track album arrives Friday (July 24) with a guest appearance from director David Cronenberg, Billboard says. It's her formal follow-up to Brat, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, her highest-charting album in the U.S., and won a Grammy for best dance/electronic album in 2025.
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It's also her second album of the year, after the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, Pitchfork notes, and she's been pushing back on one theory about it. Charli told Rolling Stone, in a recent cover story, that the rock-album talk wasn't hers.
Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said.
Charli xcx, to Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone
The album was made with her longtime producer A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, per Rolling Stone. The movie career is real, too: she stars in I Want Your Sex, which opens in theaters July 31, according to Billboard.
What's next: a handful of festivals, including Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, then a North American arena tour with Underscores that starts Sept. 11 in Philadelphia and wraps Oct. 23 in Las Vegas. (See the best new music of July for more.) She'd later bring Tinashe out at ACL to debut a song.
- Single
- “Camera,” July 21, 2026
- Album
- Music, Fashion, Film, 11 tracks, July 24
- Director
- Aidan Zamiri
- Tour
- Sept. 11 (Philadelphia) to Oct. 23 (Las Vegas)
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
