Charli XCX hijacked rock music—but not in the way anyone expected earlier this year. At midnight last night, Charli dropped a new guitar-heavy track, “Rock Music,” with a new (mostly) black-and-white video by Aidan Zamiri. It features the hyperpop icon living out some of rock ’n’ roll’s most timeless tropes: throwing a TV out of the window, head-banging, and smashing guitars.
Some confusion around the song started after British Vogue reported that Charli had decided to pivot to rock music after “Brat Summer” supercharged her career. People jumped at the prospect that the hyperpop icon might genre-bend. Late last week, however, Charli posted a behind-the-scenes video from the “Rock Music” shoot, writing, “I never said I was making a rock album.” To be fair, Charli’s new chorus literally says, “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”
Is “Rock Music” rock music? Kind of. Yes and no. Digitally manipulated guitars form the foundation of Charli’s new song, punctuated by smashing cymbals during her glitchy chorus (listed above for reference). She created the song with A.G. Cook and Finn Keane during their time in Paris, documented on her burner account in a series of black-and-white photos fitting for the new music video.
Zamiri—the director behind Charli’s mockumentary, The Moment—channels 1990s rock-and-grunge aesthetics, like Pearl Jam’s black-and-white live music video for “Alive” or the violent, muddy moshing in the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings.” After casually tossing the TV out the window with her cigarette, Charli falls over her husband, George Daniel, in a lavishly destroyed hotel room, drags a man through the hallway, and struts across Times Square—all before the chorus. When the chorus hits with heavy drums, the video switches to full color, showing the singer crowd-surfing (or floating) above a mosh pit. We see her stand next to towering piles of burnt-out cigarettes; flailing on the floor, tangled in a microphone, among broken guitars; and sitting in the back of a limo with a bedazzled neck brace (shout out to Euphoria). Zamiri packed in about as many stereotypical rock details as one video can take (and, honestly, it fits Charli).
Charli is (apparently) not making a rock album—but (now more than ever) we wish she would. The song isn’t rock, as if it were plucked straight from the 1990s or 2000s. But this is exactly the sound we should expect from the queen of hyperpop—a head-banging, well, banger injected with digital, glitchy distortion. Consider everything we thought we knew about the album thrown out the window with the TV.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.harpersbazaar.com ’
