Music

Charli XCX Debuts New Single ‘Rock Music’

British pop star and actress Charli XCX releases her latest single, ‘Rock Music,’ declaring, "I think the dance floor is dead."

Rolling Stone·May 8, 2026·via Rolling Stone

Charli XCX Debuts New Single ‘Rock Music’

RIP Brat

Charli XCX Returns With New Single ‘Rock Music,’ And Yup, It Rocks

"I think the dance floor is dead," the British pop star and actress declares

By Angie Martoccio

Angie Martoccio

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May 8, 2026

“I think the dance floor is dead/So now we’re making rock music.” Goodbye Brat Summer , hello Rock Spring! Charli XCX has returned with the new single, “Rock Music.”

Charli dropped the track hours after her friend, the Dare, debuted it at his opening set for PinkPantheress in Brooklyn. Featuring her collaborators A.G. Cooke and Finn Keane (formerly known as EasyFun), the single erupts with a blazing guitar riff, as Charli takes the mic: “Me and my friends/We go out, we take pictures/We make stuff together, and sometimes we cry/We kiss each other, real incestuous vibes.” The singer unveiled the song alongside a black-and-white video showcasing her roaming city streets and smoking next to giant piles of cigarettes.

The new song arrives days after Charli posted footage of her recording “Rock Music,” inside Paris’ Rue Boyer Studios in Oct. 2025. The cheeky caption read, “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 was referring to her recent British Vogue cover , and the magazine’s description of her next chapter — the follow-up to the massive Brat — as a “rock reinvention.”

“For me, it’s fun to flip the form,” she said in the interview. “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. We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny, but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important.”

“Rock Music” follows 2026’s Wuthering Heights , the companion album to Emerald Fennell’s film starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, and the soundtrack to David Lowery’s Mother Mary , which she contributed to alongside Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs. Last month, her How I’m Feeling Now highlight “Party 4 U” was released as a 7″ for Record Store Day .