New Shapes
Songfacts®:
- This synth-heavy banger finds Charli XCX singing about how she can't give her all in a relationship.
I don't know why I got a tendency to run away
Don't know why I'm always pushing for a sweet escape
Even though I feel so close, I just can't control how I feel
And I gotta be free, need to breathe
Rather than letting her man in, she pushes him away preferring freedom to true love. - French singer-songwriter Héloïse Letissier (aka Christine and the Queens) and American singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek also appear on the track.
Letissier reflects on a past relationship that didn't work out.
Polachek sings of an unhealthy relationship she can't let go.
The three artists are all friends and relationships is a topic they have long discussed in DMs and on podcasts. "I think we all fall in love quite differently," Charli told The New York Times. - Charli XCX has worked with both artists before: Polachek on the Pop 2 cuts "Tears" and "Delicious" in 2017, and Christine and the Queens on XCX's Charli track "Gone" in 2019.
- Charli first previewed the song as a snippet as part of her Bandsintown live show on March 19, 2021.
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- Charli XCX released "New Shapes" as her second single from Crash on November 4, 2021. "The record is about my relationship with relationships and sex and power," she told Apple Music 1's The Chart Show. "But the song itself, I suppose, it's about falling for a toxic person, being always ready to put myself in the most dangerous positions, just to feel something, which I guess it's kind of the whole record, but I feel like we've all been there at points in life."
- The readers of Music Radar voted this their Best Track of 2021. The site said: "2021's winning track flies the flag for a new generation of pop artists transforming the neon-bright sounds of the '80s into radical new shapes."
- This is one of four songs written, at least in part, before Charli began work on her 2020 lockdown album, How I'm Feeling Now. "Good Ones," "Every Rule," and "Twice" are the others.
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