Charli XCX - Camera

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode contains explicit language. [upbeat music] Charli XCX is a Grammy-winning artist who's been making music since she was a teenager. In July 2026, she released her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film. It debuted at number one on the UK charts, her fourth album in a row to hit number one there. In addition to her music career, for the last few years she's been acting in films. And for this episode, we talked about how those experiences inspired her song Camera, and how she and producer Fin Kean figured out how to translate that into music.

[singing] All I know is how it makes me feel, and it makes me feel. How it makes me feel, yeah, it makes me feel. How it makes me feel, yeah, it makes me feel. How it makes me feel when the camera's on.

Could you introduce yourself?

Yeah. My name is Charli XCX. [upbeat music] Prior to this song, I was kind of going through this thing of I don't really wanna make music for a while. Not in a dramatic way, but, you know, I'd been making a lot of stuff. I made Brat, then I made this whole kind of remix album, and I was playing a lot of shows. I was DJing a lot. I was, you know, doing all this stuff, and I think I wanted to not make music again for a while because I wasn't sure that I had anything to say. And actually, I really wanted to explore film, which has been sort of a long-term passion of mine. And over the past three, four years, I've actually been able to really act on that passion. I made a film called Eruptia in 2024, and prior to that I'd been on set with Greg Araki for, like, one day and a couple of other films for one day. And I had spent earlier in the year making a film. The film was called The Moment, and we shot it in five weeks, you know, really condensed, really quick. But in that five weeks, we really kind of bonded as a cast and crew, and it felt really creatively stimulating and rich. That lack of control that sometimes you get when you walk on set as an actor on somebody else's film is actually, for me at least, quite freeing. You know, like to go on, perform, like, you fuck up, you don't do a good take, but whatever. It makes you feel alive. There's something very, very vulnerable about that. I've spent my life, you know, since I was 14 really making music and being very much in control of my own destiny in terms of every single, like, output about me and my artist project. And the beginnings of this song was kind of me mourning that feeling and thinking about that feeling of being surrounded by these incredible people whilst shooting a film, and honestly, the feeling that I got from being on camera in that kind of a way in a acting capacity, rather than being on camera as a musician in a music video, for instance. So I was kind of like, I really want a creative pause from music. And then out of nowhere, inspiration struck, because thinking about those feelings was kind of the initial seed of inspiration for this song. It started in the summer of 2025. My friend Fin Kean is a long-term collaborator of mine now, but particularly