The Brat era has officially come to a close. For fans who have spent the last year immersed in the high-energy, club-ready soundscapes that defined Charli XCX’s recent output, the transition to her next project will mark a significant departure. The artist is making a hard pivot into rock music, a shift she describes as a necessary evolution.
A recent feature in British Vogue offers a glimpse into this new sonic direction. The article describes a track where “heavily processed guitars strafe the room, then fracture along with Charli’s voice,” as she delivers the blunt, declarative line: “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”
The shift appears to be rooted in a desire for something more introspective. Discussing another upcoming song, the piece notes, “Queasy feedback warps beneath a dead-eyed incantation about going shopping for a new personality and falling at the first hurdle.” Charli explains the thematic weight behind the track, noting, “It crosses over into how you can dress up who you are and become the ideal fantasy that you want to be in that moment. Everybody is performing, in a way.”
While the album was still in development at the time of the interview, the motivation behind the change is clear. Charli admits that continuing down a dance-oriented path would have felt disingenuous or overly melancholic. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she says. “But what’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on [rock music] could be. It made me crave something opposite. Getting back to something more internal is really nice, and really sort of quiet.”
