Charli xcx has made her rock song, and she insists it’s a joke. “Rock Music,” released Friday (May 8), is the first single from her eighth studio album, and it arrives with a black-and-white video of Charli and her collaborators smoking, mosh-pitting and bopping around New York City.
The hook is the line that got her in trouble first: “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making rock music.” Charli had told Vogue, in the interview that set off the discourse, that she was flipping the form on purpose. “We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine,” she said, adding that another dance-leaning album “would have felt really hard, really sad.”
Watch the video above, directed by Aidan Zamiri. The track runs under two minutes. Louder says it is “still pop-friendly” and “backboned by a stuttering guitar riff” somewhere between Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” and Elastica’s “Connection,” and The FADER hears vocal loops and power-chord pivots, “the feeling of a group of friends drunkenly trying on a genre.” She sings the key lines in a pouty burst of Auto-Tune, including the one that makes the joke plain: “Wow I’m really banging my head.” The next line, “I’m really hurting my neck,” carries a more grown-up sting.
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The posture is deliberate. Before the single, Charli posted on Instagram that she was 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.” On her b.sides account she explained how it began: staying in Paris above the studio, she woke up with an idea “that made me lol,” then told the guys, and it made them laugh too.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed her rollouts. The FADER points out that she tends to launch an album era with its most winking track, as she did with “Good Ones” for Crash and “Von Dutch” for Brat, and that the more vulnerable songs usually arrive with the full record. The writer’s hope is the same here: the song, in the FADER’s words, is one “that hints at something more vulnerable to come.”
The stakes are the album that follows Brat, which Louder notes was voted Album of the Year by Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The New York Times and NME. Days earlier she had walked the Met Gala carpet in custom Saint Laurent. Now she is back to a smaller, louder thing, and it’s on our list of May’s best new music. The FADER’s verdict: “As for the song, though, it rips.”
Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.
