Charli XCX drops “Rock Music,” a guitar-driven single with A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, marking her boldest creative shift since Brat. Out now with video.
Charli XCX has never been subtle about her reinventions, and “Rock Music,” her first proper single of 2026, is no exception. Released May 8 via Atlantic Records, the track crashes in on a bed of crunchy, distorted guitar and clocks out in under two minutes, with Charli singing over the din: “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.” The song is co-written and produced with her longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, formerly known as EasyFun, and arrives accompanied by a black-and-white video directed by Aidan Zamiri.
The single had its live debut hours before release when Charli’s friend the Dare previewed it during his opening set for PinkPantheress in Brooklyn. That gesture alone says something about the circle Charli keeps and the way she moves: collaborative, reactive, community-first. “Woke up and had an idea for a song that made me lol,” she wrote. “Told A.G. and Finn and they thought it was cute too. So we made ‘rock music.'” The track was recorded during a ten-day studio stretch at Paris’ Rue Boyer Studios, with George Daniel, her husband and The 1975 drummer, appearing alongside Cook and Keane in the video as her makeshift rock band.
The Sound and What It Actually Is
The track sits somewhere between Daft Punk’s rhythmic precision and the fuzzy Britpop crunch of Elastica, with a guitar riff that critics have noted sits in Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” territory. Charli’s vocals arrive Auto-Tuned and sliced through the chorus in classic PC Music fashion. This is not a genre conversion. It is, as she has made clear, a reframe. “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 wrote on Instagram. In her April British Vogue cover interview, she was more expansive:
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”
The video, also shot in black-and-white Manhattan, features Charli roaming city streets, smoking beside towers of cigarettes, making out with strangers, and igniting a moshpit. Color breaks through only when the chorus lands. Zamiri, who also directed Charli’s mockumentary “The Moment,” brings the same reactive, fly-on-the-wall energy. The visual was reportedly conceived and shot while the song was still being made in Paris.
Where This Fits in a Very Full Career
“Rock Music” is Charli’s first proper solo single since “Wuthering Heights,” the companion album to Emerald Fennell’s film starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 in February. Before that, “Brat” hit No. 3 on the same chart and No. 1 in the UK, and spent the better part of 2024 as pop culture’s defining document. She also contributed to David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” soundtrack alongside Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs, and released “Party 4 U” on 7-inch vinyl for Record Store Day last month.
The single is the opening move of what will be her eighth studio album, and festival season will serve as its proving ground. Charli headlines Lollapalooza on July 31, Outside Lands on August 7, and Reading and Leeds on August 28 and 29. She will also headline both weekends of Austin City Limits in the fall, alongside Lorde and Twenty One Pilots. The dance floor may or may not be dead. But Charli XCX is very much alive.
