The first time I saw Charli xcx live, she had nothing with her on stage except for a couple of eight-foot, light-up cubes. On the zeitgeist-y Brat tour, she had even less: no set pieces, no complicated stage design, no back-up dancers. Just Charli, a backdrop screen, and the year’s defining album. She didn’t need anything else. 

Charli’s live show never hinged on the typical hallmarks of pop pageantry like complicated choreo, outfit changes, or, god forbid, P!nk-esque vaults into the sky. What Charli delivers live—then and now—is pure, unfiltered charisma. Even on the dancer-backed CRASH tour, her show was about style over scale. She plays hypeman to her own anthems, taunts the crowd into partying with her, and stares down the camera with her expert cool-girl stare. Not many pop stars can go on an empty stage and captivate an arena all alone. Charli xcx can. 

The Music, Fashion, Film tour arrives at an interesting juncture. With its sardonic sprechgesang, appetizer-sized choruses, and crackly guitar, Music, Fashion, Film is the first Charli xcx album to feel at odds with her skillset as a performer. It doesn’t matter if you’re talk-singing or belting a chart hit: in an arena, the music still has to hit the rafters. But Music, Fashion, Film refuses to be so forward. Her persona for this record is different, too: more restrained than Charli’s bombast, more devious than CRASH’s dance-pop diva, more aloof than Brat’s 3-6-5 Party Girl.

Charli kicks off the set in total rock star mode. She wears a blazer over a pink bra and heavy eyeshadow, while her black hair covers her eyes. Gone are the “C’mon!” and “Put ‘em up!” ad libs she’d shout in between lyrics on prior tours. Now, she’s stoic, blistering through rough-edged MFF cuts while she swings the mic stand like Karen O. The guitars in her live band scorch behind her as she punches the air and flicks her hands. Even the older songs — “Girl, so confusing,” “Track 10,” “Apple” — are played with newfound distance. Apple girls be damned.

The tour teases out the essential question of Music, Fashion, Film — how do you be an artist and a pop star and a business all at once? — even more acutely than the album does. “Write a song/And then print it on a t-shirt,” Charli sings to a crowd of tens of thousands, who all happen to be wearing t-shirts with her songs on it. “I gotta say, I do respect the commitment to the bit/Now that’s persona,” she admits while committing to her new rock-star persona and eschewing her old ones. She’s singing about her own performance while it’s happening. When she sneers “People can change” during “Wink wink,” it almost reads like a dig at the fans still showing up to the gig in lime-green Brat tees. Her meta musings are compelling on tape, but live, they’re almost confrontational. 

In order to unify the Music, Fashion, Film material with Brat hits and older fan favorites, Charli turns to something she’s mostly avoided thus far as a touring act. She might be making “Ro-o-o-o-o-o-o-ck music” now, but her current tour is all pop spectacle. That spectacle announces itself as all the best ones do: with a dozen ceiling-high plumes of fire. Pyrotechnics erupt across the stage during the foreboding “House,” and “Pink diamond” derails into ear-splitting, grinding metal. During “Card Declined,” Charli struts across the catwalk with her legion of dancers like a posse of cheerleaders on their way to terrorize the high school’s gay kid. Call it what you want — aura-farming, rock star drag, or unmistakable cool. Charli is still an effortless entertainer. 

As the Wuthering Heights cut “Dying For You” melts into “Club classics,” she dons her black sunglasses for a people-pleasing Brat set. It’s a bit of necessary fan service (though the real heads got more out of hearing “Next Level Charli” and “Roll With Me”). To some, the Brat tracks might feel like a jolt from the moodier Music, Fashion, Film material. After all, MFF is full of sardonic lines and pauses in vocal delivery that feel uncanny live (“It got taken out of context…obviously”). But the two records go hand-in-hand. Music, Fashion, Film makes more sense when it’s complimented by the pop-girl persona the album seeks to deconstruct. Plus, it’s always charming to see hundreds of “XCX”-branded underwear launched into the sky during “Guess.” 

The tour’s true highlight is how Charli’s juicy post-Brat budget adds new scale to her live staples. She sings the first half of “Track 10” as she did on prior tours, prancing around stage and belting “I can’t help it I can’t stop." But as the synths twist and decay in the song’s outro, her troupe of dancers appear behind in a shock of light. It’s gloriously dramatic and fitting for “Track 10’s” autotune desperation. “Pink diamond” is particularly menacing with dancers thrashing behind her in hot pink strobe. And “Vroom Vroom” lands like a smash hit when performed on top of a massive three-tiered stage. Charli’s minimalist shows remain her greatest achievement as a performer, but the elaborate production takes these familiar songs to new heights. 

If anything unifies the set, it’s the voice of David Cronenberg, whose monologue closes out Music, Fashion, Film. His voice opens the show, and it reappears like a ghost, popping up in transitions and outros to remind the audience “No one lasts forever.” It’s a jarring message to hear between, say, “360” and “365,” but it threads the needle of the tour: this is all performance. It’s temporary. In the long run, nothing matters. Charli might not have an answer to her existential pop star crisis, but Cronenberg does: “Oblivion is freedom.”

The Music, Fashion, Film tour doesn't not rely as much on Charli’s unmistakable pop-star juice, but it proves she’s as mercurial, contradictory, and compelling as ever.