Charli XCX says she would be "really struggling" if she wasn't making an album during lockdown

Earlier this month, Charli XCX announced that she would be making an entire album from scratch during the coronavirus pandemic. The popstar has been transparent with fans about the process, sharing lyric and single artwork ideas, messages between producers and collaborators, and sharing snippets of songs during Instagram Lives, Zoom conferences, and more.

So far she's released two singles from her How I'm Feeling Now LP, "Forever" and "Claws".

Yesterday (26 April), Charli XCX spoke to BBC about her new album, and how she's coping in lockdown. Responding to how she is, Charli XCX said, "I feel quite good right now. I definitely have days where I'm just like, "Oh My God, I feel so unproductive and lost," but generally, I'm quite surprised at how I'm handling this time."

When asked what she would be doing if she wasn't working on the album, Charli XCX replies, "I'd be really, really struggling. Binge-watching TV and being actually quite sad."

Discussing the album-making process and sharing it with fans, she explains, "It's quite exposing, definitely - but the second I started doing it, I didn't find it scary any more. And that's not because all my ideas are great. Some of my ideas, even the ones I'm posting, are things that maybe won't come into full realisation. But I think, for my fans, it's really nice for them to see the process."

She goes on to explain that the biggest technical difficulty of making the album is "Recording my own vocals. I haven't done that since I was 15 and making demos in my parents' house. I'm so slow and it drives me crazy. I literally want to throw something at myself."

Charli XCX adds, "I don't know my way around the software yet. And I'm not skilled enough to comp my vocals - which is where you sing the song five times and choose the best bits from each take. So now, instead, I'm just singing the whole thing right through. I probably sing each part 30 times and by the 30th one, I'm like, "OK, this one is perfect. All the breaths are in the right place, all the nuances are right, this is the one". But it's a very long process."

The album is due for release in two weeks. Charli XCX says of the tight deadline, "I wanted to do the album in an intense period of time, because I thought it would be more fun for people watching, and also because there's more likely to be some kind of screw-up or error in a short amount of time, which is probably more interesting."

When asked about the progress on the album, she responds, ""Claws" and "Forever" are finished, and then there are three other demos which are definitely going to go on the album. After that, there's one other song that's a maybe. But I don't just want to record 10 songs and put them on the album. I want to record multiple songs and decide which are the main 10."