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“I think the dance floor is dead/So now we’re making rock music.” Goodbye Brat Summer, hello Rock Spring! Charli XCX is back with the new single “Rock Music”.
Charli released the track a few hours after her boyfriend The Dare first played it as support act for PinkPantheress in Brooklyn. The single, which features her colleagues AG Cook and Finn Keane (formerly known as EasyFun), breaks out with a fiery guitar riff – and Charli takes the microphone: “Me and my friends/ We go out, we take pictures/ We make stuff together, and sometimes we cry/ We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes.” She presented the song together with a black and white video that shows her wandering through city streets and smoking next to huge piles of cigarettes.
The new song comes a few days after Charli posted footage from Paris’ Rue Boyer Studios from October 2025 showing her creating “Rock Music.” The funny caption read: “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.” She was referring to her current cover of “British Vogue”, in which the magazine presents its next chapter – the successor to the huge success “Brat” – described it as a “rock reinvention”.
Not macho rock
“For me, it’s fun to flip the shape,” she said in the interview. “We know there will be people who will be bothered by it – but that’s okay… If I had made another album that was more dance-oriented, it would have felt really heavy, really sad. We did our version of Analog, which is totally stupid and fun, but filtering it through our lens and making sure nothing felt too macho was important.”
“Rock Music” follows “Wuthering Heights” of 2026, the companion album to Emerald Fennell’s film with Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, as well as the soundtrack to David Lowery’s “Mother Mary”, to which she contributed alongside Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs. Last month, “Party 4 U” – a highlight of their album “How I’m Feeling Now” – was released on 7inch for Record Store Day.
Charli has become increasingly active in the film industry: she stars in Pete Oh’s Erupjca and the Brat mockumentary The Moment. Her upcoming projects include Julia Jackman’s “100 Nights of Hero,” the Gregg Araki-directed “I Want Your Sex,” Cathy Yan’s “The Gallerist,” and a film by Takashi Miike whose title has not yet been announced.
Festival headliner of the summer
This summer, Charli is hitting the festival circuit: she’s headlining Lollapalooza (July 31), Outside Lands (August 7), and the Reading and Leeds festivals (August 28 and 29). In the fall she will be on stage at both weekends of the Austin City Limits in Texas – together with Lorde and Twenty One Pilots.
