Charli XCX
and Her Guitar Ambitions
A 19-year-old Charli XCX.
According to what mainstream music media is reporting, Charli XCX is moving toward a rock-oriented sound for her next album, stepping away from the club-driven direction that defined her last cycle. The shift is framed around a simple statement: “the dance floor is dead.”
NEW YORK CITY | By Pablo Herrera
That statement is not literal. It never is. The dance floor is of course not dead, it never will be. What may be dead is “her” sort of dance floor, especially if she attempts to do some sort of “Brat 2.” But let’s not fool ourselves, club music does not end. Statements like that are just carefully curated marketing strategies, which Charli does pretty damn well.
In a recent appearance on the podcast “And the Writer Is...”, Billy Corgan has been pointing in a similar direction. He speaks about rock coming back as part of a cycle. Around the same moment, he appeared on stage with Sombr at Coachella, performing “1979,” a song released in 1996 that still holds weight across generations.
And the difference here is curiously fundamental. “1979” is not a mainstream song. It never was. It was a song able to capture what the 90s rock embodied and never had the intention of becoming a hit, because the hits at that time were a totally different thing than a hit conceived as Charli did and is doing nowadays.
The real question now is what kind of past Charli is ready to recycle and how she is going to interpret rock from her mainstream way of making music. It could certainly help the genre, it could potentially damage the genre, although it will certainly make a lot of money from it.
Recent pop has been heavily tied to the 80s. Clean synths, controlled nostalgia, predictable references. Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, and others have worked inside that space. That cycle is now saturated. A shift toward the 90s feels inevitable. Guitars, distortion, less polish.
But the 90s were not only sound. They came with a specific posture. A version of rebellion tied to masculine codes. A culture that often reduced or excluded women. There is no reason to bring that back. There is also no value in recreating a version of grunge that was built more on image than on substance and now just doing it from a female perspective under marketing statements designed from a gender perspective.
A move toward guitars does not mean anything on its own. It can open space. It can also become another surface trend.
If the goal is to make a sound mainstream again, then the intention is commercial. That is not a problem. It just needs to be stated clearly.
Charli XCX during the Brat tour. Phto: Joseph Okpako/WireImage.
Charli XCX understands how to position herself. She reads shifts early and moves with precision. She knows how to operate inside the market and bend it in her favor. That is part of her strength. It is also the reason to question the framing of this move as something purely artistic.
Mainstream artists respond to cycles. They also accelerate them. That does not mean they define what lasts.
Charli XCX is far less independent than what she thinks she is. She is not doing what she believes is good, she is doing what she believes is good to make more money. And that is cool and totally fair. But I’m not buying her marketing lines at all. I also do not think she will really be able to create something “completely new.” I do not think she did it with Brat either, but that is part of another post we can talk about.
