Rock Music or Not, We’re Living for Charli XCX’s New Music Video
The pop icon dropped a new song that’s not not part of a rock album—or is it?
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Charli XCX does not do things quietly, and her latest drop is no exception. At midnight, she released Rock Music — a guitar-heavy, digitally distorted banger accompanied by a mostly black-and-white video directed by Aidan Zamiri — and promptly sent the internet into a spiral trying to categorize it. The short answer: don't bother.
The confusion kicked off after British Vogue reported that Charli was pivoting to rock following the career-defining chaos of Brat Summer. Speculation exploded. Then Charli posted a behind-the-scenes clip from the shoot with a pointed note: "I never said I was making a rock album." According to Harper's Bazaar, the track — built on digitally manipulated guitars and cymbal crashes — was created with collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane during a Paris session she documented on her burner account in a fitting series of monochrome photos.
The Video Is Its Own Argument
Zamiri, who directed Charli's mockumentary The Moment, leaned all the way into classic rock iconography — and then some. Think Pearl Jam's stark live footage, think the muddy mosh pit of The Smashing Pumpkins' Bullet With Butterfly Wings. Before the chorus even lands, Charli has tossed a TV out a window, stumbled over husband George Daniel in a wrecked hotel room, dragged a man down a hallway, and strutted across Times Square with a cigarette. When the chorus hits, the video flips to full color: she's crowd-surfing above a mosh pit, tangled in a microphone on the floor amid smashed guitars, and — in the most inspired detail — sitting in a limo wearing a bedazzled neck brace that would make the Euphoria costume department proud.
Is Rock Music actually rock? Only in the way that Charli does anything — on her own terms. The glitchy distortion and hyperpop DNA are unmistakably hers; the guitars are more provocation than genre commitment. She's not abandoning the dance floor so much as blowing it up and rebuilding it with a Les Paul. The chorus literalizes the whole bit: "I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music." It's a wink, not a manifesto.
Whatever the album ultimately becomes, Rock Music makes one thing clear — Charli XCX is the only artist right now who can make genre-bending feel less like a creative experiment and more like an inevitability.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
