Charli XCX’s New Single ‘Rock Music’ Signals a Guitar-Forward Shift

Charli XCX has a new single out called “Rock Music,” and it arrives with an Aidan Zamiri-directed video that feels intentionally calibrated to underline a stylistic pivot. The track leans on crunchy guitars while still operating in the pop continuum she has spent her career shaping; in the clip she even manages to kick her high heels into them. Zamiri, who also shot the video for her “Guess” remix with Billie Eilish, stages the song as both a tease and a thesis: a pop star testing how far she can push the edge of her own brand.

The single arrives on the heels of a British Vogue cover profile in which Charli confirmed that the proper follow-up to 2024s Brat is on the way. She was blunt about the direction: “making rock music,” she told the magazine, promising more guitars and less Auto-Tune. That phrasing is telling. After years of hyperpop maximalism and digital polish, this feels like a deliberate rewind toward something more analogue, even if she frames it with knowing humor. “We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” she said, and the names attached to those sessions underline the intent: Brat producers A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, formerly known as Easyfun, were present during the recording work in Paris.

Rock Music therefore functions as a bridge. It is not a rejection of the production-heavy pop Charli helped normalize, but a reconfiguration of it. The guitars are crunchy, yes, but the melody and rhythmic instincts remain pop through and through; the song reads less like a swerve and more like a deliberate extension of a career that has always thrived on mutation.

“We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” Charli said about the sessions in Paris.

Her output this year has been multifaceted. In February she released a companion album for Emerald Fennells film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a project that brought in figures like John Cale and Sky Ferreira, “the latter of whom claimed all was not as it seemed.” Beyond music, Charli has been moving through film sets: shes attached to Daniel Goldhabers Faces of Death remake, Gregg Arakis forthcoming I Want Your Sex, and her own mockumentary The Moment. All of which paints the picture of an artist stretching laterally as much as stylistically.

There is context here worth noting. Brat placed No. 7 in our list of The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far, and that records critical standing makes this next move more than a simple genre flirtation. Its an artist with a celebrated recent record testing how to translate that momentum into a new set of textures without losing the thread that made her work distinctive.

The “Rock Music” video and single do not erase Charlis electronic past; they repurpose it. Whether the guitars herald a long-term reorientation or a chapter in a career defined by reinvention, the change is staged with calculated awareness. Watch the video and hear the song below, and measure for yourself whether this is an evolution or an experiment.