A.G. Cook's The Moment (The Score) is a mixed bag of tension and brilliance

The Moment (The Score) finds A. G. Cook at that exact conversion point on his score for the film of the same name – an A24 mockumentary that follows Charli xcx as she crests arena-scale visibility in a phase where even the unscripted has to be cleared for approval.

Cook being behind the wheel isn’t curatorial flourish so much as baked into the premise. His long-term collaboration with xcx has helped build a pop language where artifice isn’t so much a guilty secret but the medium outright: desire rendered in hard plastics, intimacy routed through interfaces, pleasure engineered so efficiently it starts to feel slightly hostile. That makes him unusually fluent in what the film is satirising – stardom as a system of control, an economy of access and self-management performing spontaneity. The score’s wager is simple: if you strip the voice away, does the machinery still sing? Sort of.

When The Moment (The Score) hits, it rings like a tuning fork. “Residue” moves like a club track with its oxygen rationed, the 303 a personified, burgeoning panic attack as more distorted, atonal elements seep in and sour the thrust. “Momentism” is tighter and meaner, bright edges and snapped rhythm – effective, though still working inside the same anxious loop. “Offscreen” is the record’s most convincing cue, Cook in his most recognisable form, stepping straight out of Britpop – Cook’s 2024 three-disc set (Past, Present, Future).

But The Moment (The Score) is also, often, too obedient to the function of scoring. Large stretches behave as fairly placid connective tissue – competent atmosphere, sanitised ambience – and when the sound is extrapolated from the image, that dutifulness can read as stagnant. “Depth” and its reprise offer soft-focus piano melancholy, the kind of prestige-film sadness that signals interiority without any actual supply of it; the cue gestures at depth, but doesn’t commit to a perspective sharp enough to leave an imprint without its visual component to feed from. On the big screen, that restraint may be immaculate: it clears room for dialogue, edits, faces, emotional weight. On record, it can feel shapeless, empty and a step too far from its counterpart film to retain much interest as an independent offering.

Closer “Dread” is where Cook finally allows a crack of explicit Charli mythmaking to rear its head, choosing the artefact that xcx, even in her Brat-era saturation, can’t quite shake off. It’s a warped reprocessing of “I Love It”, the breakthrough whose brash invulnerability and weaponised nonchalance became a public shorthand she’s spent years outgrowing in real time. Crucially, it’s the only lift from her catalogue on the project. Even with her newer, cooler canon waiting in the wings as the obvious referent, Cook withholds quotation until the closing minutes, then uses it as diagnosis: pop’s habit of fossilising you at the moment you first became useful. Dread, indeed.

As accompaniment, it works. As an album, it’s uneven – flashes of brilliant, modern tension work bridged by long runs of dutiful ambience. Competent, occasionally electric, rarely essential.