post-poptimism vs hyper-rock

making ‘rock music’ for the internet

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the dancefloor is dead

In the last twelve hours, Charli XCX’s new single has racked up over 3 million views on X and is charting at #17 on YouTube’s music Trending chart. Ever since Charli teased the refrain in British Vogue, "They say the dance floor is dead / So now we're making rock music," the song has courted controversy with her dedicated Brat-era fanbase.

The first line's observation that the dance floor is dead is well borne out statistically. Bars, restaurants, and clubs are closing at a frightening clip as alcohol consumption—their primary revenue source—falls off a cliff. In a recent clip from The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference, the DJ and producer Diplo, who has worked with Charli XCX in the past, claimed run clubs would replace nightclubs. "More peptide shots, fewer tequila shots" was how Gunjan Banerji, host of The WSJ Money Interview, framed it.

but are we making rock music?

Despite AI-drafted letters from disappointed fans framing the single as "trend-chasing," "Rock Music" feels nothing like rock revival darlings Geese or Fontaines D.C., or "indie sleaze"-adjacent acts like The Dare or The Hellp; nor is it a pastiche of 2000s indie icons like The Strokes or The Killers. The song is minimal: a simple electronic synth and guitar riff repeating across two verses, broken up by crashing drums and glitched-out vocals on the final phrase of each refrain—"rock music."

The song is an earworm, coming in at a tight two minutes and three seconds. It’s optimized to be listened to on repeat, and we can already see the meta-calculation paying memetic dividends. The rock glitch has already become a TikTok template. Like the "Apple" dance from her breakout album Brat, music in the 2020s flourishes when it compresses motion and sound into a viral meme.

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This is where rock music has historically struggled.