Charli XCX has shared her new single ‘Rock Music’. Check it out, and the mosh-heavy video, below.
Last month, Charli’s team confirmed that she was finishing work on her new album, and shortly afterwards, Charli herself implied the next release would be going in a rock direction. In an interview with British Vogue, she declared, “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”, though she later clarified, “I never said I was making a rock album.”
It turns out she had been quoting directly from her new song, ‘Rock Music’, which sees her stray from the club atmosphere of 2024’s ‘Brat‘ and embrace crunchy guitars. “Me and my friends, we go out/We take pictures and make stuff together/And sometimes we cry/We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes,” she sings.
The song comes alongside a grungy music video, which sees her enlist collaborators A.G. Cook, Finn Keane (formerly known as Easyfun) and her husband, The 1975‘s George Daniel, as her rock band.
In a post on her unofficial Instagram account, b.sides, she explains that the video was directed by Aidan Zamiri (the filmmaker behind her mockumentary, The Moment) while she was recording the song in Paris. “It was fun to be immediately reactive and come up with the idea for the video as the song was still being made. The song ideas informed the video, and the video ideas informed the song. Full circle kinda thing,” she wrote.
Check it out below.
Elsewhere in the British Vogue piece, she also revealed that she was determined not to make ‘Brat 2.0’. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she confessed. “What’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be”.
Her last studio album was 2024’s ‘Brat’, the release which became a cultural phenomenon, giving rise to “’Brat’ Summer” and confirming Charli XCX as a global superstar. Since then, she has released a soundtrack album for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights.
As well as working on that soundtrack, the ‘360’ singer also penned music for the A24 film Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway, starred in her own mockumentary The Moment, took on a role in the new romance Erupcja, and locked in a role in fantasy 100 Nights Of Hero.
She also played a comedic version of herself in the TV show Overcompensating, and was recently cast alongside Supergirl star Milly Alcock in a new horror film directed by Takashi Miike.
As for upcoming live dates, this August, she’ll return to the stage to make her headline debut at Reading & Leeds, topping the festival bill alongside Fontaines D.C., Raye, Florence + The Machine, Dave and Chase & Status. Visit here for tickets and more information.
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