Alongside indulgently unadorned ruminations on fear and love, the record is boundlessly liberating, decadently indulgent, and irresistibly danceable. Aitchison has delivered her greatest work yet". Valerie Magan of Clash awarded the album 9/10, commenting: "Charli is no doubt an album of too many features and too many parts, but it somehow all fits together in a way that allows her penchant for unconventional songwriting and her ear for an exciting melody to work in concert, creating a project better than most anything she's done in the past". Hannah Mylrea of NME stated that Charli is "Bold, brash and brilliant, this is Charli XCX at her most genuine, and it's dazzling." Neil McCormick of The Telegraph commented that "The sexy android cover and star-studded collaborations (including alternative icons Lizzo, Haim and Christine and the Queens) on her third album, Charli, suggest an all-guns-blazing pitch for blockbuster status. But the contents are far weirder than that implies. [...] Come the century's end, you can almost imagine future critics scratching their AI-augmented brains and still touting Charli XCX as the next big thing." The Line of Best Fit gave the album the "Album of the Week" designation, with Claire Biddles adding that "Charli is almost there. Ultimately she's too gloriously messy and multitudinous to produce such a thing. Although she could often benefit from an editor, her process and vision doesn't adhere to the music industry's prioritisation of the album format – which feels right for an artist whose music could be read as an attempt to dissolve time itself." Mick Jacobs, writing for PopMatters, gave the album a 6/10 rating, noting that "compared to the previous compilations' sense of liberation, Charli sounds at odds with its some of its invested players and parts: the label, the fans, and Charli the artist." Jacobs praised the track "Silver Cross", but criticised others such as "Thoughts" and "Blame It on Your Love", which he described as "a unneeded revamp [that] seems to exists just because her and Lizzo share both a label and rising profiles in the industry." Rachel Aroesti of Q gave the album a mixed review, writing, "Between Cook's trademark production and the song-stealing brilliance of her collaborators, it often feels as if Aitchison's nasal croon and counter-intuitive toplines are the least interesting bits of her own project." Year-end lists Commercial performance Charli debuted at number 14 on the UK Albums Chart with