Pop star Charli XCX, whose multiple award-winning 2024 album Brat was voted Album Of The Year by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The New York Times, NME, The Washington Post and possibly dozens more, has apparently turned to rock music.
The English singer-songwriter's new single, which is literally entitled Rock Music, is still pop-friendly, but it's backboned by a stuttering guitar riff that sits somewhere between Hole's Celebrity Skin and Elastica's Britpop-era classic Connection. The video, meanwhile, features a lively-looking moshpit. And if you're not convinced, it's all over in less than two minutes.
The lyrics to Rock Music include the lines, "I think the dance floor is dead…so now we’re making rock music," while Charli told Vogue last month, "For me, it’s fun to flip the form. We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine.
"If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad. We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny, but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important."
This isn't the first time the singer has been associated with the rowdier end of the market. During XCX's Coachella set last year, her video backdrop listed Baltimore hardcore stars Turnstile among several acts she thought deserved bigger audiences, while in September 2024 it was reported that billboards advertising a Brat remix album featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst had appeared across the US.
Some believed the reported sightings to be fake, and when Brat And It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat appeared the following month, Durst's name was not among the credits.
