Charli XCX rock music arrived today with a mosh-heavy video, pushing her sound away from the club-driven pulse that defined 2024’s Brat. The release puts A.G. Cook, Finn Keane, and George Daniel on screen as her rock band, while Charli shifts the project toward crunchy guitars.
Paris Recording
Charli XCX said the song and video were built together while she was recording in Paris. “The song ideas informed the video, and the video ideas informed the song. Full circle kinda thing,” she wrote in a post on her unofficial Instagram account, b.sides.
That approach lines up with the lyric previewed last month in British Vogue: “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.” She later added, “I never said I was making a rock album.” The split between those two lines is the story here: she is not selling a genre pivot so much as testing how far her post-Brat writing can stretch.
Aidan Zamiri And The Band
Aidan Zamiri directed the video, extending a working relationship that already includes Charli’s mockumentary The Moment. His presence keeps the rollout inside Charli’s visual ecosystem rather than handing it off to a generic performance clip.
The cast matters because it turns the video into a band statement, not a solo showcase. A.G. Cook and Finn Keane are longtime collaborators, while George Daniel brings a second layer of private and professional overlap as her husband. That lineup makes the mosh-heavy framing feel deliberate, not incidental.
Brat Aftermath
Since 2024’s Brat, Charli has moved through a soundtrack album for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, music for Mother Mary, her own mockumentary The Moment, a role in Erupcja, and a part in 100 Nights Of Hero. She also played a comedic version of herself in Overcompensating and was cast alongside Milly Alcock in a new horror film directed by Takashi Miike.
Those credits show why “Rock Music” lands as more than a side project. Charli has spent the Brat period widening the brief across film, television, and collaboration, and this single keeps that run going without pretending she has abandoned the club record that made her current era so commercially useful.
Her next big public moment comes in August, when she makes her headline debut at Reading & Leeds alongside Fontaines D.C., Raye, Florence + The Machine, Dave, and Chase & Status. If “Rock Music” is the opening statement, that festival slot will be the first real test of how far this harder-edged sound can travel on a live stage.
