On the cover of Charli XCX’s seventh album, three sages of late-twentieth-century culture—Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and fashion designer Marc Jacobs—are gathered in an unremarkable kitchen. The image, by turns deadpan and reverent, sets the tone for a record that the British pop star has described as a celebration of her three favourite mediums. Music, Fashion, Film arrives after the monocultural overexposure of 2024’s Brat, a neon-green juggernaut that defined a season of memes, marketing, and cigarettes. In a series of black-and-white teasers and a Vogue cover shoot, Charli signalled a pivot toward rock and introspection, though the rollout has been characteristically slippery: the lead single was cheekily titled “Rock Music” but was not a rock song, and she later insisted she had never promised a rock album. The result, according to early listeners, is a concise, thirty-minute set that veers from grunge-flavoured stomps to whispered ballads, a document of an artist wrestling with the machinery of her own fame.

Seven thousand kilometres east, another pop figure at the centre of a different cultural ecosystem released a song that also enlists heritage as a balm against contemporary pressures. Raisa, one of Indonesia’s most bankable vocalists, premiered “Cahaya Hati” (Light of the Heart) in a collaboration orchestrated by telecom infrastructure firms iForte and Protelindo Group. The track, produced and arranged by guitarist Eross Candra of the rock band Sheila on 7, weaves together seven traditional instruments—the Fu, Sape, Javanese siter, Javanese and Sundanese kendang drums, Javanese rebab, and the giant Dol drum—with a choir, piano, and electric guitars. Lyrically, it offers a message of resilience and hope, a corporate document explicitly framed within an ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) commitment to cultural preservation and creative empowerment.

Both projects emerge from a pop landscape where stardom is no longer merely about music but about sustaining a multichannel identity. For Charli XCX, the “total machinery” expected of a modern pop star—the phrase comes from Swedish critic Saga Cavallin in Dagens Nyheter—has become the subject itself. Cavallin argues that the album’s paratexts are the text, while the music itself feels almost relief-like, immediate and stripped down. In Italy, Il Fatto Quotidiano notes a deliberate withdrawal from the online persona that fuelled Brat, with the singer herself telling fans she wanted to “live less online.” Yet the pivot has left some audiences puzzled; an Independent reviewer calls the work “perplexing” and “frustrating,” even as they concede moments of excellence in its production. The tension between sincerity and irony, between the confessional and the curated, threads through every track.

In Indonesia, “Cahaya Hati” functions less as personal therapy and more as an institutional gesture, a way for a conglomerate to align itself with national cultural values while propping up a pop star’s repertoire. The involvement of multiple generations of musicians—from the Batavia Madrigal Singers under conductor Avip Priatna to traditional ensemble leader Dunung Basuki—mirrors the cross-disciplinary ambition of Charli’s project, albeit with a very different ideological sheen. Where the London artist’s black-and-white kitchen tableau hints at a search for raw, dangerous experience (“I’m always craving an experience that feels dangerous,” she sings on “Camera”), the Jakarta collaboration is polished, consensus-building, and wrapped in the language of uplift.

What links these disparate releases is a shared intuition: that the way forward lies in reaching back. Whether through the ragged guitar riffs that A.G. Cook filters through analogue electro crunch, or through the seven acoustic voices of the archipelago pressed into a pop structure, both records treat tradition not as a museum piece but as a resource for replenishment. Charli XCX’s album closes—in a final, unsettled image—with a camera flashing on an exhausted artist; in Jakarta, the closing bars of “Cahaya Hati” ring out with the layered resonance of drum and rebab. Each, in its own register, asks what it means to make music when the self has become the product.