"I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music." That's the money quote. Charli XCX is the subject of a new British Vogue cover story, and it's mostly about her work on the proper follow-up to her career-exploding 2024 landmark Brat. Charli has been extremely busy since Brat. She just released her Wuthering Heights soundtrack album in February, and she's acting in approximately one million movies this year, but apparently she's had time to work on another record amid all of that.
When Charli says "we," she means that she's making the album with two longtime collaborators, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane (formerly known as Easyfun). Cook is a hyperpop pioneer who's not particularly known as a rocker, but he's apparently playing guitar on this new record. The great Laura Snapes caught up with Charli in Paris during last October's Fashion Week, where she was working on the album with Cook and Keane. Charli says, "We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it. We knew it would be this very hectic, rich time, and we like creating in that kind of atmosphere."
Charli made these comments months ago, so it's a little funny that they're coming out today, one day after Madonna announced her Confessions II album with press-release quotes about dancefloor deliverance. But Madonna knows the importance of pop-star reinvention; she practically invented it. After Charli fully embraced club sounds on Brat, it makes perfect sense for her to zag in another direction. I'm sure Madonna understands. (Madonna probably doesn't care.)
In the Vogue story, Charli says, "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." Charli also says that she's basically making music for herself while acknowledging that she's not really doing that: "Now there’s just so much noise around anything else that I do in a way that I sometimes find a bit pointless. I’m like, ‘Why don’t I just make the album and listen to it with A. G. and Finn?’ But there’s obviously a narcissism that prevents me from doing that." She's reportedly recording without much Auto-Tune on her voice these days, and she says, "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."
Here's what A. G. Cook says about the record: "It’s looking for this intensity. It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album.’ She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much. What do you hold onto? I’m inspired by seeing how she’s so ready to do that rather than take it easy."
The British Vogue article includes a few scenes where Charli plays songs from the in-progress record for Snapes. On one track, Snapes writes, "Queasy feedback warps beneath a dead-eyed incantation about going shopping for a new personality and falling at the first hurdle." (Sample lyric: "Card declined.") Another song has "tough guitar against a sweet vocal chant." (Sample lyric: "I can take you to heaven like it’s 2007/ Pop star in my bedroom like it’s 2007.")
Snapes describes "a scuffed, sweetly melancholy song about the 'quite mad' night at the philosopher girl’s apartment," which is also reportedly about embracing the fleeting quality of the Brat phenomenon. (Sample lyric: "Nothing’s gonna last forever/ And no one’s gonna last forever.") Charli says that another of her new songs, the quietest of the tracks that she played for Snapes, is about how acting makes her feel "something new and undiscovered and something kinda violent." Snapes compares it to the soul-baring Brat highlight "I Think About It All The Time." And once again, Charli reiterates her admiration for the late Lou Reed: "He’s not a traditional figure in any way, shape or form."
Charli says that she doesn't want to keep writing songs about her husband, the 1975's George Daniel. Instead, she says the new record "is commenting on how I interact with the joint main love of my life outside of George and what would happen if it was taking from me — how I would have no purpose, and how for good or bad, art does provide me with purpose in my life."
The piece also mentions that Charli has "serious nerve damage in her neck from performing." This makes sense. She did a lot of headbanging while touring behind Brat. She says, "I never thought I’d play arenas in my life, and who knows if I will again. Maybe I won’t, but after you’ve done a few, you’re like, ‘Oh, this place.’ It really happens." Read the full article here.
