Charli XCX has pushed back against confusion surrounding her new music, insisting she “never said” she was making a rock album.
The British pop star declares on the chorus of her divisive 2026 single “Rock Music” that: “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”
“Rock Music”, the lead single from her upcoming album Music, Fashion, Film, received a mixed reaction – largely due to the fact that the song is, noticeably, not a rock song.
Charli later said on Instagram that the song’s title was an inside joke in the studio.
The offending lyric was shared before the song’s official release in an interview with British Vogue, in which her new project was described by the magazine as a “rock reinvention”, with the wider narrative around the album going further to assert those themes.
Madonna was among those to seemingly respond negatively, captioning an Instagram post: “If your dance floor feels dead/ Maybe you’re playing the wrong music.”
“Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something I never said,” Charli told Rolling Stone in a new cover interview.
“But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way,” she continued. “I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and [producers and co-writers] AG Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.”
Charli, 33, added that the lyric in which she declares the dancefloor to be dead was “very much about my relationship with [dance-pop album] Brat, and my personal experience with that album”.
“My husband runs a dance-music label,” she pointed out. “There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”
In the same interview, Charli told the journalist that the Rolling Stone profile would “probably be my last long-form interview with a journalist for a minute”, as she confessed to being in “the worst place mentally that I’ve been in my life”.
“I have actually been a lot more offline,” she said. “I don’t really look as much anymore. It’s just better for my brain. I know people probably won’t believe me, because I am inherently, at least in the past, a very online artist.”
Music, Fashion, Film is scheduled for release on 24 July.
