In a year that’s already seen English pop darling Charli XCX branch out to film work, her latest musical escapades have been making quite a stir. After announcing a supposed shift to a rock sound with her new work, she’s spent the last month toying with fans’ expectations before releasing single ‘Rock Music’ this week.
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How do you follow an album like ‘Brat’? The 2024 electropop LP was a commercial smash hit around the world, won three out of the nine Grammy Awards it was nominated for, and spawned its own cultural era with ‘Brat Summer’.
Well, Charli XCX decided to immortalise this period of her life in film, with the 2026 release of her movie ‘The Moment’, a mockumentary with her as lead star, telling a fictionalised tale of her life after the album and preparing for its massive world tour. ‘The Moment’ released in cinemas at the start of the year, around the same time as Emerald Fennell’s cinematic retelling of ‘Wuthering Heights’, which Charli XCX wrote the soundtrack for.
With her big screen break established, Charli has returned the focus to her career as a singer-songwriter. In an interview published by British Vogue in April, she made several allusions to a drastic change in style for her upcoming musical releases. Demoing a track backed by distorted guitars with a lyric “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music” led to rampant speculation that she would be reinventing herself as a full-blown rockstar. During the interview, Charli suggested whatever came next, it wouldn’t be like ‘Brat’, saying “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad. What’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be.”
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For those who expected an immediate reinvention as a hard rock artist, you may be slightly disappointed – Charli took to social media last week with a behind-the-scenes studio clip and the playful caption “a video of me making a song called “rock music” that is not actually rock music which is funny because i never said i was making a rock album. love you xx”. The footage shows her at Rue Boyer Studios in Paris last October, working with frequent collaborators Finn Keane and A.G. Cook on the new track ‘Rock Music’.
While ‘Rock Music’, which released on the 8th of May, does feature the electric guitars and the chorus refrain “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”, rock music it is not. The track centres around her trademark autotuned vocals and pop energy, but with a stomping rock beat and lyrics about headbanging. The single comes with a black-and-white music video supervised by ‘The Moment’ director Aidan Zamiri, showing Charli engaging in heavy music clichés like moshing and crowd-surfing, as well chaotic band scenes with cameos from Keane, Cook, and Charli’s husband and The 1975 drummer George Daniel.
‘Rock Music’ might not be her ‘Stairway To Heaven’, but it’s a lot of fun, and Charli XCX is clearly enjoying making music right now. You can stream the song now, with new music from her as-yet untitled seventh studio album expected later in the year.
