Charli xcx confirms rock album in Vogue interview: "I think the dance floor is dead"

Speaking to music writer Laura Snapes for a new Vogue interview published this week, the pop star described how she, and producers AG Cook and Finn Keane secretly recorded the follow-up in a Paris studio during fashion week, working between shows and afterparties. “We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it,” Charli explains. “We knew it would be this very hectic, rich time and we like creating in that kind of atmosphere.”

The first taste of the new direction arrives via a track played for Snapes:, a guitar heavy track with Charli singing the lines, “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.”

The new album – Charli's eighth – finds the 33-year-old largely abandoning the autotune that defined Brat in favour of a rawer vocals and Cook’s guitar work: “We were doing our version of analogue, which is so silly and funny,” she explains, “but putting it through our lens, and making sure that nothing felt too macho, was important... 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.”

“If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” Charli explains. Her husband, 1975 drummer George Daniel, adds “Charli sort of broke dance music.”

Charli says the record is less about her marriage to Daniel and more about art: “the joint main love of my life outside of George... What would happen if that was taken from me. How I would have no purpose.”