Charli XCX Is Making a Rock Album and Jim Jarmusch Compared Her to Iggy Pop — The Story Behind the Reinvention

Charli XCX has revealed she is working on a rock album following her Brat era and foray into acting. British Vogue journalist Laura Snapes heard preview tracks and reports that much of the autotune is gone, focused on Charli's voice and guitar. Director Jim Jarmusch praised her work as genuinely punk.

Following the extraordinary commercial and cultural success of Brat (2024) — an album whose specific green-aesthetic hyperpop sensibility became one of the year's defining cultural moments, inspiring a political moment when Kamala Harris's campaign adopted the Brat aesthetic — Charli XCX suggested she was considering stepping back from being a pop star to pursue acting. That declaration was, it appears, about as reliable as most artists' declarations of imminent retirement.

A British Vogue profile published in April 2026, which included a conversation with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, has revealed that Charli is making a rock album. The specific nature of the revelation is careful: this is not a conventional rock record in the tradition she is being compared to, but something Charli describes as bending 'the possibilities of what my perspective on that could be.' The Iggy Pop comparison comes from Jarmusch, who likens Charli to the punk legend — a comparison whose specific significance lies in the attitude it describes rather than any sonic equivalence.

Laura Snapes, the journalist who previewed the music for Vogue in February 2026, reports that much of the autotune that characterises Charli's previous productions has been significantly reduced or eliminated, with the new music centred on Charli's voice and the guitar of her frequent collaborator A.G. The production shift represents not just a genre pivot but a specific relationship with her own voice — presenting it without the digital mediation that has been part of her sonic identity since her earliest work.

Understanding what Charli XCX's rock album might mean requires understanding the specific creative philosophy that has distinguished her across her career. She has never made the same album twice: her work moves through sonic territories — the early UK chart pop, the hyperpop experimentalism, the Brat-era high-energy dance production — while maintaining a consistent underlying preoccupation with the specific emotional textures of modern life, club culture, and the particular exhaustion and exhilaration of contemporary female existence.

A rock album, in her framing, is not an attempt to become a rock artist in any conventional sense. It is the specific next creative challenge she has set herself: using a genre's vocabulary to say something her previous genre vocabularies couldn't. The autotune reduction is the specific formal choice that most directly signals this shift: stripping back the technological mediation that allows a specific kind of emotional distance and replacing it with the vulnerability of a voice recorded without correction.

The Brat era's acting period — during which she appeared in multiple film projects — may have informed this direction in a specific way: acting requires inhabiting vulnerability without technological protection, and the transition from that specific creative mode back to music-making may have changed her relationship with what she wants the music to expose about herself.