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

“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 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.

Charli has been increasingly active in the film industry, starring in Pete Oh’s Erupjca and the Brat mockumentary The Moment. Her upcoming projects include Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero, the Gregg Araki-directed I Want Your Sex, Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist, and a Takashi Miike movie, the title of which has yet to be revealed.

Charli will hit the festival circuit this summer, headlining Lollapalooza (July 31), Outside Lands (Aug. 7), and the Reeding and Leeds Festivals (Aug. 28 and 29). In the fall, she’ll headline both weekends of Austin City Limits in Texas, alongside Lorde and Twenty One Pilots.