Charli XCX says she is making a rock album, following the tremendous success of 2024's club-leaning Brat.
In a new interview with Vogue, the 33-year-old singer/songwriter/producer (real name Charlotte Aitchison) revealed the genre swap, saying, “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”
With its lime green colour scheme and lowercase, arial narrow typeface, her sixth album Brat's aesthetic helped launch a pop cultural movement (and a million memes) in the summer of 2024. From that emerged "Brat Summer," a movement based on the album's "confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude” that even attempted to help presidential candidate Kamala Harris get elected.
Charli put an end to the Brat campaign in February with the release of her meta mockumentary The Moment, and now she wants to rock.
“If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she told writer Laura Snapes. “For me, it’s fun to flip the form. We know there’s gonna be people who are bothered by it, but that’s fine.”
She claims that despite it catapulting her into mainstream radio and playing arenas, Brat became something so much bigger than music. And she needed to immediately pivot ro something new.
“[Brat] made me crave something opposite," she explains. "Getting back to something more internal is really nice and really sort of quiet.”
While her new husband, producer/drummer George Daniel, adds that with Brat “Charli sort of broke dance music," she says she wants to challenge herself as an artist and how she views music and genre.
“What’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be,” she said.
As for what these rock songs are about, being a newlywed is dominating her thoughts.
“I don’t really want to write songs about my husband forever," she confesses. "I’m not sure how interesting that is, and he knows that. If I write about our relationship, I’m probably only really interested in writing about some of the more obscure feelings of being married.”
Read the full interview here.