Charli xcx’s “Rock Music” is a pop tune about making rock music. Additionally it is a rock tune about making pop music. Neither description holds for lengthy.
Launched on Could 8, 2026, the observe runs one minute and fifty 5 seconds. Followers observed instantly. “Come on! Simply 1:55!?” one wrote. The brevity isn’t a flaw. It’s the joke touchdown and getting off stage earlier than anybody checks the punchline too exhausting, slicing out abruptly like somebody pulled the plug mid-thought.
Charli xcx’s “Rock Music” doesn’t behave the way in which the title suggests. It retains going across the act of reinventing your self, staging headbanging and stage dives as self-aware gestures whereas by no means actually committing to the concept that the dancefloor is useless. It hangs between the road “I feel the dance flooring is useless” and the truth that all the pieces round it nonetheless strikes like membership music in a leather-based jacket.
The video, directed by Aidan Zamiri, opens with Charli leaning out of a New York window smoking, then pushing a tv set onto the road under. Two of rock ‘n’ roll’s most time-honoured delinquent actions, dispatched in underneath a minute.
What follows leans exhausting into indie sleaze: cigarettes in bulk, a corset that followers learn as a neck brace, a moshpit that bursts by a frozen body on the finish. It evokes the sweaty, scruffy gigs of the MySpace and Tumblr days. Kate Moss circa Pete Doherty. Hedonism earlier than interpersonal surveillance.
One element that shifts how this performs: the tune and video had been made concurrently. Charli defined on her b.sides Instagram that Zamiri was filming her within the Paris studio with Finn Keane and A.G. Cook dinner whereas the observe was nonetheless being written. “It was enjoyable to be instantly reactive and give you the concept for the video because the tune was nonetheless being made,” she wrote. “The tune concepts knowledgeable the video and the video concepts knowledgeable the tune. Full circle kinda factor.”
That suggestions loop is uncommon. Most movies arrive after the very fact as illustration. This one grew alongside the music, which is why the visuals by no means really feel like they’re chasing the observe.
A.G. Cook dinner and Finn Keane’s manufacturing is the actual story. The distorted guitar riff sits on a beat that’s too stiff and skinny to really rock. It by no means fairly settles.
Regardless of the title, Rock Music isn’t actually a rock tune, which is what sparked the early confusion round Charli xcx’s supposed rock period after a Vogue interview hinted at a style pivot.
Charli later clarified she by no means mentioned she was making a rock album, and the tune performs like a response to that misunderstanding slightly than a dedication to it.
Charli opens in a low stakes, virtually throwaway register. “Me and my pals, we exit / We take photos and make stuff collectively / And generally we cry / We kiss one another, actual incestuous vibes.” It’s intimate in a intentionally flattened, half-ironic method.
By the point she deadpans “Wow, I’m actually banging my head / I’m actually hurting my neck / The nerve harm is actual,” the tune has already tipped into caricature. It seems like making an attempt it on in entrance of a mirror and laughing midway by.
The discourse round Rock Music has been predictably literal. A Vogue interview quoted the “dance flooring is useless” line and headlines ran with the concept of a full rock pivot. Followers have been arguing over whether or not Rock Music is definitely a rock tune in any respect.
Nu-disco singer Rochelle Jordan tweeted again: “It ain’t useless till WE say so.” Charli later posted a video of herself making the tune with the caption that this was not really rock music and that she by no means mentioned she was making a rock album. She meant it as clarification. It learn as one other layer of the bit.
What stands out is how the tune treats group id. The repeated “me and my pals” framing begins to really feel like a manifesto for the insular unit she made the album with: Cook dinner, Keane, husband George Daniel from The 1975 hovering within the video. However every time the road returns, it feels much less like solidarity and extra like a figuring out nod to how artists carry out “the gang” for the digicam.
Listeners have been reaching again to seek out the place this got here from. One fan wrote: “Returning to Sucker omg.” One other: “Sounds just like the stuff from Myspace period Charli to me.” They don’t seem to be improper. Twelve years in the past she opened Sucker‘s title observe first verse with the road “Head bang, pink rocks / Gold fangs, shit scorching.” The prodigal daughter has returned to the mosh pit, besides the mosh pit is now a inexperienced display screen and the group is watching on telephones.
The lyric “I hope they catch you at this time / But when they don’t, it’s okay” is a small, beneficiant shrug inside a tune pretending to be reckless. Nerve harm exhibits up as actual bodily reality, one thing she has spoken about earlier than, however it isn’t framed as tragedy or proof of authenticity. Simply one other facet impact of committing to the efficiency.
Rock Music by no means actually argues something concerning the state of guitar music. The observe cuts earlier than it may possibly stretch that feeling any additional.
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