The dancefloor and the moshpit are the same on Charli XCX’s “Rock Music”

Charli XCX and her friends have sold their turntables and bought guitars.

“I think the dancefloor is dead,” Charli XCX sings through a microdose of her characteristic Auto-Tune. It’s a sentiment she expressed in a recent interview with Laura Snapes for British Vogue. Funnily enough, Charli’s claims about the dancefloor are the same ones that people have been making about rock and roll for nearly as long as the genre has existed. 

With the breakthrough of BRAT, it seemed the mainstream had finally gotten hip to this cult favorite artist who’d spent over a decade being hailed by those in the know as the “future of pop.” Since that future arrived, Charli’s done her fair share of digging into her musical past. Her soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—which featured collaborations with John Cale and Sky Ferreira, the latter of which has been the subject of some copyright controversy—harkened back to the techo-goth and synthwave sonics of her 2013 debut album, True Romance. Her latest single fuses chunky, distorted guitars with fuzzy, electronic vocal manipulations for some Sucker–sounding pop-punk. In some ways, it’s nothing new to her, but it’s a sound she slips into like a pair of perfectly broken-in leather pants. To those of us who were blasting “Break The Rules” out our windows back in the day and remember when Rivers Cuomo having a writing credit on a Charli song wasn’t a joke made by someone on r/mu but a fact, there’s a familiarity to hearing what Charli called “our version of analog” (“our” referring to longtime collaborator AG Cook, who plays guitar on the new track). 

In the wake of BRAT-mania, Charli noted that her interest in music had waned, her burgeoning film career taking its place. While she’s still pursuing an acting career in several film projects, it seems the inspiration for her musical future has been reignited by a look into her back catalog, revisiting its more rock-oriented inclinations with a looseness and clarity that comes with years of moving in the opposite direction of that sound. Charli’s demonstrated something that her musical descendants like 100 gecs, underscores, and Slayyyter have all proven—the existence of hyperpop/pop-punk horseshoe theory. To paraphrase the late great Alex Chilton, “Rock Music” is here to stay.

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