“I never said I was making a rock album,” Charli XCX posted on Instagram in May, just before releasing her single “Rock Music” — well, on July 24, we’ll find out just what kind of album she actually made.
The cover of Music, Fashion, Film features a new photo of three giants in each of those fields: the Velvet Underground‘sJohn Cale (who worked with Charli on the Wuthering Heights track “House”), designer Marc Jacobs, and Martin Scorsese. Aidan Zamiri, who also shot the “Rock Music” music video, took the photo.
A full track list hasn’t been announced, but her album will include the two songs she’s released so far: “Rock Music” and “SS26,” both of which include prominent guitar. “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music,” she sings on the former song. But she’s suggested that lyric shouldn’t be taken literally, writing on Instagram, “I’m not gonna explain where I was coming from with ‘Rock Music,’ but all i know is that things can be funny, earnest, sincere, and joyful all at the same time and that’s what i feel about a lot of the things i make.”
The album takes its title from a lyric in the wry, wistful “SS26”: “When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it,” she sings. “Yeah, we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell/ Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.”
In April, Charli told Vogue that she was changing her sound. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said, “but what’s interesting for me is to bend the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be.” Producer A.G. Cook told Vogue that the sonic shift was deeply felt. “It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album,'” he said. “She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much.”
In February, Charli released Wuthering Heights, her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation. She’s been busy with a new career in acting, with three releases already this year: the A24 mockumentary The Moment, which she conceived, produced, and stars in as a fictionalized version of herself; the horror remake Faces of Death; and the comedy Erupcja. in She also co-stars in the erotic thriller I Want Your Sex, which opens July 31, a week after the album drops.
