Charli XCX has been reflecting on the frenzied reaction to her recent single, Rock Music, and to one line from the song in particular.
The pushback when Charli sang ‘I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music’ was immediate, not least from Madonna, who responded with a caption on an Instagram post that read: ‘If your Dance floor feels dead / Maybe you're playing the wrong music’.
All good fun, but XCX has now clarified what she meant by that line in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“That lyric is very much about my relationship with Brat, and my personal experience with that album,” she says, before suggesting that she still appreciates good new dance music as much as anyone.
“My husband [the 1975 drummer George Daniel] runs a dance music label,” she points out. “There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”
On a similar theme, XCX also played down the suggestion that Music, Fashion, Film, her forthcoming album, will be the rock record that some people have predicted. After discussing her love of The Velvet Underground and asking herself “What if we made a record with guitars?” in 2025, some fans assumed that this was the direction that her next album was taking, but it sounds like this isn’t the case.
“Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said,” Charli says. “But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way. I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and A G Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.”
That means trying to avoid being influenced by anyone else, too: “To be honest, when I make music, I’m thinking less about other music as a reference point. I actually shut myself off, and we just escape into our own world. I’ve spoken at length about loving Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvet Underground. But would I say that the record sounds like any of that? No.”
This admission comes despite the fact that XCX recently collaborated with Cale on House, one of the songs she contributed to the soundtrack to Emereld Fennell's 2026 adaption of Wuthering Heights.
Elsewhere in the interview, Charli opens up on her relationship with the late producer Sophie, who she worked with extensively on her 2016 EP, Vroom Vroom.
“I lost someone who completely changed my life, and there are a lot of feelings to work through with that, especially because they were so attached to my creative life in a really positive way, but also sometimes in a difficult way,” she says. “Being able to express those feelings through my work has been really cathartic for me.”
Music, Fashion, Film will be released on 24 July.
