Charli XCX is making a rock album: “I think the dance floor is dead”

Charli XCX has been busy with film projects this year, but she’s not done with music; she talked to musical journalist Laura Snapes in October for a cover story that’s just come out in British Vogue, where they discussed the new album she’s working on. She has two regular collaborators, A.G. Cook and Finn Keane (formerly Easyfun) working with her, but she says they’ve moved away from Brat‘s electro-pop and the art-pop of the Wuthering Heights soundtrack to another genre entirely: rock. “I think the dance floor is dead,” she tells Snapes,”so now we’re making rock music.”

Charli also tells Snapes, “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.” She also says, “I don’t really want to write songs about my husband forever. I’m not sure how interesting that is, and he knows that. If I write about our relationship, I’m probably only really interested in writing about some of the more obscure feelings of being married.” What she wants to discuss on the new album, she adds, is “commenting on how I interact with the joint main love of my life outside of George. And what would happen if that was taken from me. How I would have no purpose, and how for good or bad, art does provide me with purpose in my life.”

Read the profile in full in British Vogue.

Charli’s sure to be oft-quoted prediction of dance music’s doom comes a day after Madonna announced her own return to the dance floor with Confessions II.  It also comes between weekends of a Coachella where rock legends Nine Inch Nails embraced the dance floor by playing a full set with Boys Noize and younger bands like Geese and Turnstile made a case that rock still does have a place at the festival.