“Truly believe anti marketing will become a thing soon,” Charli XCX prophesied on X earlier this month. What is anti-marketing? “still marketing but it’s just a different approach, more intimate, personal, private, one on one. less about the projection of scale,” she explained. What has that actually meant in terms of her album rollout for Music, Fashion, Film? So far, it’s been club nights and expensive-looking music videos and glossy profiles — if there’s been anything one-on-one, it hasn’t been with her fans. Her business-strategy forecasting was met with sarcasm and disdain — her role as pop’s leading philosopher somewhat rejected by people online. The brat rollout verged on monoculture, with the singer saying “yes” to nearly every opportunity, as detailed in her film The Moment earlier this year. That strategy, if her not-quite mockumentary is to be believed, left the singer exhausted and depleted and without a sense of identity, forcing her to drum up new strategies when it came to selling yet another album. The projection of scale is indeed smaller now, but this album rollout so far mostly resembles … a regular album rollout.

Charli isn’t trying to make big, sweeping changes to the marketing industry, or even the music industry, so much as she appears to be trying to distinguish the rollout for Music, Fashion, Film. It’s not enough that it’s visually different — the album title is capitalized, and the cover art is in black and white as opposed to brat’s brat green — no, Charli wants no one to question if this is a rebrand. She isn’t going to repeat herself.

Charli first teased Music, Fashion, Film on her X account, posting a snippet from “Rock Music,” the first single off the album. It was undoubtedly a pivot — notably less poppy and straightforward than anything off brat or Crash or much that came before. Almost immediately after the song came out, Charli’s tone around the work shifted: This was something she’d made for herself. “I’m not trying to repel people away or convince people into liking me,” she wrote. In conversation with British Vogue, she doubled down on the dance floor being “dead,” something she says in “Rock Music.” “We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine,” she added.

Recently, Charli, who has long relied on social media as a primary form of being in touch with his fans, hit upon that which feels unpopular — praising Phoebe Bridgers’s decision to do away with phones at her recent Madison Square Garden shows, which she sees as an indicator that the industry is moving away from conventional forms of marketing. If nothing else, the concept of having your phone out at a concert feels counterintuitive to the preservation of music, fashion, or film (though at any given time, someone is probably engaging with one or all three of these things using their device). In the interim, she did pop-up shows with phones, well, very present. While Charli doesn’t have a Madison Square Garden show on the books yet (she might not want to do arenas at all anymore), she does plan to show the album in “independent cinemas” this week ahead of its July 24 release. Maybe showing it at independent cinemas is a rejection of, say, an AMC theaters takeover, but little she’s done so far feels like an actual rejection of conventional anything, except in the sound of the music itself.