True Romance (Charli XCX album)

Background and release

"You're the One" has been compared to Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1991 song "Kiss Them for Me" and Charli agreed: "At the time, I was listening to a lot of dark pop, so I was inspired by a lot of the deep bass sounds. Sure, Siouxsie is there, too. We just kind of rolled with it."

Charli explained the meaning being the album's title: "Every corner of my own romantic history is explored on this record, so for me, it's very raw, it's very honest, and it's very true." The majority of the album's tracks were previously released on the You're the One EP, and through the Heartbreaks and Earthquakes and Super Ultra mixtapes.> The album is named after the Quentin Tarantino-written 1993 film of the same name, which is sampled on "Velvet Dreaming" from the Super Ultra mixtape. On 9 April 2013, the standard edition of album became available to stream on Pitchfork Media in full.

Critical reception

True Romance received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 76, based on 18 reviews, which indicates "generally favourable reviews". Pitchfork Media's Marc Hogan wrote that Charli "pull[s] from moody 80s synth-pop, sassy turn-of-the-millennium girl groups, and state-of-the-art contemporary producers to create something distinctive and immediately memorable", concluding that she "stamps her personality across the entire project, and True Romance suggests she'll be worth following for a while." Rebecca Nicholson of The Guardian found the album to be "surprisingly oddball and packed with production quirks that often resemble a smoothed-off Grimes", adding that "while there's still the odd remnant of Marina [and the Diamonds]-lite pop, this sounds like an imminent star steadily staking a claim to her own turf."

Heather Phares of AllMusic noted that Charli "has a flair for combining a wide array of pop culture sources into something fresh and familiar, as well as a fondness for strong female characters." Phares continued, "Since quite a few of these songs were already road-tested, it's not surprising that this is a strong debut, but just how consistently catchy and personal True Romance is might raise a few eyebrows." Spin's Puja Patel viewed True Romance as "a strident departure from those frivolities so far as solid, true-to-aim songwriting is concerned, but the divergence and a touch of the silliness remains: Goth, she is not. Dramatic? A bit. Complicated? Like every budding pop starlet. Defiant? Absolutely." Despite stating that the album "is confusing at times and will most definitely require multiple listens", PopMatters' Enio Chiola opined that Charli is "the fun pop you don't have to be embarrassed about listening to, and she's definitely worth focusing your attention. True Romance is certainly the true beginning of an illustrious career." Lauren Martin of Fact commented, "Love, lust and longing are chronicled and dissected in True Romance through online relationships being gradually given tangible, tactile form, setting Charli up as a young pop star to be reckoned with." Rolling Stone critic Will Hermes described True Romance as "the pop-album equivalent of a wicked Tumblr".

In a mixed review, Nick Levine of the NME felt that although the album "begins strongly" with "Nuclear Seasons" and "You (Ha Ha Ha)", the songs eventually "become samey and Charli [...] shoves some kind of speak-rap into almost every track", concluding, "At the moment, her music is best consumed in blog-sized chunks, not as a stodgy 48-minute album." Similarly, John Murphy of musicOMH expressed that "[t]here's much to enjoy on True Romance, although it's probably best sampled in small doses as it doesn't hang together that successfully over the course of an album." Paula Mejia of Consequence of Sound dismissed the album as "a valiant attempt that doesn't do much more than provide the soundtrack for 'getting ready to go out' songs on tinny laptop speakers." Slant Magazine's Kevin Liedel criticised the album as "a little too slickly produced and self-aware to deliver the kind of spontaneous creativity or carefree chic that Charli XCX aims for", while dubbing its music "almost incidental, a postscript to the larger brand, confirming that whoever 'Charli XCX' actually is, she's more product than artist."

Commercial performance

True Romance debuted at number eighty-five on the UK Albums Chart, selling 1,241 copies in its first week. By February 2015, the album had sold 6,302 copies in the United Kingdom. In the United States, it entered the Heatseekers Albums chart at number five, and fell to number twenty-two the following week. The album had sold 12,000 copies in the US as of May 2014. True Romance debuted and peaked at number eleven on the ARIA Hitseekers chart in Australia.

Track listing

Notes

Sample credits

Personnel

Credits adapted from the liner notes of True Romance.