Charli XCX releases new single called Rock Music

Singer Charli XCX has announced the release of a new single called Rock Music.

The Brat hitmaker, 33, whose real name is Charlotte Aitchison, released the song on Friday with an accompanying music video. It is expected to be the lead single from her upcoming album.

The official video for the song, directed by Aidan Zamiri and shot predominantly in black and white, starts with Charli throwing a speaker out of a window and smoking multiple cigarettes at once.

In a social media post, she wrote: “Rock music. song and video out now.”

It comes after an interview in Vogue appeared to suggest the 360 singer was “making rock music” for her follow-up to 2024’s Brat, before she said in a post on Instagram: “I never said I was making a rock album.”

She told the fashion magazine: “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad, but what’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be.”

The new album will not feature her trademark auto-tune, according to the Vogue piece. It will follow her Wuthering Heights companion album to Emerald Fennell’s film of the same name, released earlier this year, and also the Brat album, which sparked a cultural phenomenon.

The “Brat summer” trend, which caused a frenzy on social media, incorporated sultry fashion choices inspired by the neon green and black album cover.

Of her new record, she added: “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.”

She said the new album would be inspired by her love of art and “what would happen if that was taken from me”, and how it gives her purpose in life.

Charli added that she did not want to mention her husband, The 1975 drummer George Daniel, on the album after he was referenced on a number of tracks on Brat, including Club Classics and Sympathy Is A Knife.

She said: “I don’t really want to write songs about my husband forever. 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.”

The singer starred in The Moment, a semi-fictional film looking at the release of Brat and the world tour that followed, earlier this year, and also appeared in other film projects including Pete Ohs’ Erupcja and Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights Of Hero.

Charli has had two UK number one singles and three number one albums, and is best known for tracks such as Boom Clap, Guess and I Love It with Swedish duo Icona Pop.