How I'm Feeling, Five Years Later
Half a decade after its release, Charli xcx’s COVID album continues to reveal its prescience, with musings on hope in the face of total oblivion.
I was in love for the first time. We were on my duvet, my head on his chest, and I looked up at him like a puppy. His gaze was a soothing balm to my anxious, insecure instincts. There was an indelible warmth to that gaze, too; when he looked at me I felt seen. Sure, it was terrifying being known, but when he was with me I wasn’t so scared. He was holding me like no other man had before – brought out a side of me I’d previously thought dormant.
We’d met a couple of months prior. He was, for me, another half-hearted right swipe; the type of boy I’d convinced myself was out of my league. He messaged back, then again, then again. He asked for my socials – maybe he could be the one, I thought. Now we were here, our relationship consummated; seven weeks had really flown by. (Swoosh!) In his sapphire eyes, I saw my future.
While I was in love, the world was dying. Everyone’s favourite douchebag got re-elected for the second of a currently indefinite number of terms. The environmental impacts of the increasingly popular artificial intelligence machines threatening to govern more and more aspects of our lives were becoming apparent. Israel was continuing to commit its atrocities in Gaza; likewise with Russia in Ukraine. My boyfriend and I watched these horrors unfold from my palm, him spooning me as we watched my TikTok. I remember us mostly saying nothing as we watched the world end – the occasional ‘oh God’ or ‘oh no’ before I scrolled down and he hugged me tighter. After a while, I switched my phone off and we carried on kissing.
Charli xcx was going through something similar in 2020, caught between intimacy and the apocalypse. After the COVID-19 pandemic cut short a string of tour dates, xcx retreated to her Los Angeles home to isolate with her boyfriend, Huck Kwong. They’d been dating on-and-off since 2014 – the year xcx first saw mainstream success – but almost broke up prior to the pandemic, with xcx telling Zane Lowe that “we were living on separate sides of the country; even though we were physically far apart, we were emotionally quite distant as well.” She eventually credited the COVID lockdowns with saving her and Kwong’s relationship. They, too, watched the world fall apart, and lived to tell the tale.
Though she was restricted from travelling to studios or flying in producers to work with her, chronic workaholic xcx found her way around lockdown restrictions to connect with fans and carry on creating. This first took the form of a daily livestream series, announced on the eighteenth of March, which included guests such as Clairo, Rita Ora and Diplo partaking in workouts and art classes via Zoom. xcx also performed at the Minecraft music festival hosted by 100 gecs, yet something was off. She couldn’t bear to put out content for content’s sake, it seemed. She had to make a record.
This record was first teased on the third of April, when a Reddit file containing details of the album leaked online; the prank gained validity when xcx and Atlantic Records, her label, each retweeted the link. Three days later, xcx officially unveiled her plan: the record would be called how i’m feeling now and would be made using only the resources that xcx had at her fingertips, including her home equipment and her connections with producers like A.G. Cook and B.J. Burton. She also said that the whole project would be a collaboration with her fans, and would use Zoom calls to liaise with them about song & artwork ideas, as well as share new material. Sketches of songs and scribbled lyrics eventually coalesced into the final album, released on the fifteenth of May (only just meeting xcx’s self-imposed deadline of six weeks).
Is it a stretch to call how i’m feeling now xcx’s best work? It trades in the same hyperpop stylings as her previous efforts, only here it’s dialled up to eleven – as though the cabin-fever circumstances of its conception are reflected in the angsty, anxious sound. The lyrical content is the most focused and direct of her career, with musings on hope and being in love in the face of total oblivion. Its only proper competition is BRAT, the slime-green success story that propelled her to A-list status last summer. While that album is undeniably her most successful and beloved, I’d argue that how i’m feeling now cinches it to the top spot, if only on the basis of personal preference. It’s a stunning, sharp set of songs that sound as much like a cry for help as they do a loud declaration of love, and the two conflicting feelings – love and fear – coexist uncomfortably in xcx’s vocal performance. Yeah, fuck it, this is her best album.
The record is a quarantine record – one of the first – yet it makes strikingly little mention of life in quarantine. ‘anthems’ is the only track to explicitly address the practicalities of self-isolation: “I’m so bored / Wake up late eat some cereal / Try my best to be physical,” she sings in the opening lyrics, while synths skitter chaotically behind her vocals. Instead, many of the songs are about the knock-on effects of forced isolation: the broken relationships of those you isolate with might be healed, but what then? You still can’t see your friends.
There’s an existential dread that penetrates so much of how i’m feeling now; ‘c2.0’, a reworking of xcx’s own posse cut ‘Click’, flips that track’s braggadocio into a nostalgic paean for her friends – as though she’s eulogising them while they’re still alive. “I miss them every night,” she repeats with premature nostalgia over the chopped sample, “I miss them by my side.” Though things would eventually go back to normal, with bars and clubs reopening in due course, listening to the song takes you straight back to those solo spring walks, wondering how long it’d be until you could hug your friends again. In fact, you might draw a parallel between then and now; as it feels like we’re again playing witness to the world’s descent into madness, songs like these match the hopelessness that naturally comes with watching society melt. When I hear xcx sing of her clique “running through [her] mind like a rainbow,” I think of the high-school houseparties I’ll never get back, the gender non-conforming friends whose safety is currently under threat. The moments of partying are precious in part because they can’t be replicated. But that realisation still sucks like a bitch.
That’s part of what makes this album so special. Though it’s a lockdown album, it’s filled with timeless revelations on love and anxiety as a result of change. In fact, once the synthetic banger ‘pink diamond’ is done opening the album, there’s a trio of gorgeous, cautious love songs. ‘forever’ directly addresses the tension of xcx and Kwong’s relationship, as she feigns making peace with his drifting away – with the underlying implication that she’d still die for him (or, as she puts it, take “a dive in the blue”.) The chaotic ‘claws’, meanwhile, is the purest distillation of love on the record, with xcx’s schoolyard chant of ‘I like, I like, I like’ projecting wide-eyed adoration onto a willing canvas. This track’s instrumental is one of the most thrilling on the album, too, with spirited clangs congealing into a canned breakdown of the whole song.
It's the last of these love songs, ‘7 years’, that is the most intriguing. Like ‘forever’, it’s clearly autobiographical in the context of xcx’s relationship with Kwong, with the former apologising for her addiction to work and her distance. Yet there’s a determination, too, to move forward and commit to this man. The track’s subtle, startling realisation comes early, as xcx makes a confession: all this time, she’s been scared to admit – to us, to Kwong and to herself, that she is completely in love. Another workaholic might say that love gets in the way of true creativity; on this song, xcx rejects that notion and falls into her lover’s arms.
Aside from love, the record’s main theme is – for want of a better descriptor – overthinking. xcx takes a scalpel to her personality, scrutinising her self-destructive tendencies and how these have the capacity to corrode her own relationships. It’s a concept made manifest most prominently on ‘detonate’ and ‘enemy’, a one-two punch of wrenching home truths. The former is particularly heartbreaking, with xcx first discussing her volatility then using it to challenge the notion that she should ever be loved – which is perhaps more relatable than she considers. If ‘detonate’ is more explosive (pun intended) with its outlook, ‘enemy’ is far more intimate. It compares Kwong to xcx’s archnemesis; as he gets closer to her, she becomes more known, more understood. xcx, the classic tortured artist, fears vulnerability as an ant fears the boot, wracked with anxiety that one day she’ll be discovered for who she really is – a “bad person”, as she says. Imposter syndrome is a more cliché subject for the modern songwriter, but what truly sells it is xcx’s angle, as well as her singular vocal performance.
In fact, the vocals throughout are utilised in a subversive, excellent way. Across these blown-out instrumentals, it would’ve been tempting to let xcx’s talent as a vocalist shine, yet she and her collaborators run the other way. Many of these tracks find her smothered with Auto-Tune, sounding both detached and direct with her robotic sleekness – yet there’s frequent yelps and cracks beneath the artifice that illuminate the lyrics. There’s a stunning, surprising contrast between the vocals and the format.
Nowhere is this dichotomy – between the robotic standard of Auto-Tune and xcx’s impassioned delivery – more apparent than on the sweaty, seismically heartbreaking ‘party 4 u’, where xcx raps and sings in alternating passages. Though, the real shiner is its final segment, where (on a bed of layered vocals that shift and crinkle like cling film) xcx makes one final plea: “come to my party!” It doubles as a metaphor for her career and desire for an audience – offering an explanation for why she’s an overthinker, so self-destructive, so perfectionist.
‘party 4 u’, which recently went viral on TikTok, is undeniably in the upper echelon of Charli xcx songs. It’s a soaring, three-act epic of a song that I could write essays on (and have!). Many will argue that it’s how i’m feeling now’s emotional centrepiece, and though it’s maybe the most annihilatingly sad song on the album it’s also a slight outlier. Sure, it encapsulates certain themes of isolation and overthinking, but that’s not what the album wants to leave you with. how i’m feeling now is ultimately an album about being optimistic – about looking imminent devastation in the face and fucking your boyfriend anyway. Because if these are the end times, why shouldn’t we have our fun? Life’s too short to be pessimistic. I see a similar dynamic in BRAT’s closing duo of songs: ‘I think about it all the time’ considers motherhood in the context of xcx’s career goals, before ‘365’ gleefully takes a coke-addled key to the whole thing and says ‘fuck it!’
In fact, the veins of ‘365’ are in how i’m feeling now’s closer, ‘visions’ – which, to me, is the record’s true centrepiece. Looking out over a desolate horizon, xcx turns to her lover and apologises for the past while acknowledging a rough road ahead – yet something’s pulling at her. That’s hope, that presumed ultimate enemy of xcx promising that she’ll overcome her demons, telling her to give in and see the light. And she does. And then the track takes off into two minutes of electronic chaos; the best way I could describe it would be a carousel ride going two hundred miles per hour being set on fire, before it all crashes down and leaves a beautiful, haunting image in its wake.
That’s how i’m feeling now in a nutshell; sure, the world’s going to shit, and sure, your own mind is against you, but there’s still joy to be found. It’s to xcx’s credit that she refreshes the ‘love will save the day’ trope into something decidedly anti-trite, repurposing it for our own apocalyptic age and not caring about the outcome. In fact, xcx and Kwong would break up a couple of years later, but that’s not the point, just as me and my boyfriend parting ways is irrelevant. The fact is that we, like xcx and Kwong, had a pretty good fucking run, and for a time he helped ease the burden of living in a world that didn’t seem to want me – nor anyone – living on it. Now, like they always have, my friends fill that role, and maybe that’s what xcx was trying to tell us all along: whether it’s with your lover (‘7 years’), your friends (‘c2.0’) or yourself (‘detonate’), true human connection is the only thing that gets us through.
‘visions’, particularly in these wearisome times, offers a soothing balm to my anxieties. xcx, master manifester, sings of having “pictures in [her] mind]” – as though the thought alone can suffice for the real thing. We know it can’t, but this is the age of ‘fuck it we ball’, so gaslighting yourself might be the way to go. The hope – the blind, dumb optimism – is the thing that will lift us over the hill, as it did five years ago. That’s what how i’m feeling now is really about: making it through. Besides, when you’re locked in at home, sometimes the pictures are all you have to go on. But sometimes the pictures are enough to give you hope that you’ll take more.
her best album!! this piece inspired me to relisten today <3
Incredible take on an incredible album. And they say music journalism is dead!!!