Charli XCX’s New Album: Everything We Know So Far

Charli XCX has been working on a follow-up to BRAT. Here’s everything we know about the pop star’s “rock album” so far.

A “rock album”? When did that happen?

That’s how Charli herself characterized it in a new British Vogue story. Despite the shift in genre, Charli is still working on it with two longtime collaborators, A. G. Cook and Finn Keane (formerly known as Easyfun), though Cook is apparently playing guitar on it. (If you want a taste of what that might sound like, check out the records Cook produced with his partner, Alaska Reid.)

Journalist Laura Snapes, who caught up with Charli XCX in Paris during last October’s Fashion Week, wrote the piece. “We knew we wanted to go to Paris to do it,” Charli said. “We knew it would be this very hectic, rich time, and we like creating in that kind of atmosphere.” It’s unclear how far into the process she is now.

Did Charli XCX tease the album before the news dropped?

A day before the story was published, Charli XCX’s once-private second account changed its handle from 360_brat to b.sides, where she shared a photo gallery capturing those recording sessions. The caption read: “Me alex and finn in paris @ rue boyer last year. spent 10 days recording here. Aidan and alaska came. Alex dj’d the mcqueen show. Played some songs for some friends at the studio. Went to the cinema. Had lots of steak frites. felt really inspired.”

She also updated her Spotify bio, which now reads: “I feel so lucky that I feel so inspired. If you feel inspired then you’re lucky too. But if you don’t feel it right now, that’s okay. Because one day you’ll feel it, and when you do, you’ll feel like you’ve been let in on the best secret in the world. And then it will fade away again.”

What else has Charli said about the album?

In the British Vogue story, Charli gave a little more backstory about the direction she took with the record. “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.” She added, “Now there’s just so much noise around anything else that I do in a way that I sometimes find a bit pointless. I’m like, ‘Why don’t I just make the album and listen to it with A. G. and Finn?’ But there’s obviously a narcissism that prevents me from doing that.”

Charli also said that the new album Charli “is commenting on how I interact with the joint main love of my life outside of George and what would happen if it was taking from me — how I would have no purpose, and how for good or bad, art does provide me with purpose in my life.” Presumably, that means there’s no lyric about wanting to rock out with George.

Cook had this to say about the process: “It’s looking for this intensity. It’s not just this flex of, ‘Oh, I did this other album.’ She’s really responding to a feeling that a lot of people have in 2026 of there being so much, almost too much. What do you hold onto? I’m inspired by seeing how she’s so ready to do that rather than take it easy.”

What does the album sound like?

Snapes got to hear some of the in-progress album, and her descriptions offer some idea of what the record might sound like. Of one song with the sample lyric “Card declined,” she writes, “Queasy feedback warps beneath a dead-eyed incantation about going shopping for a new personality and falling at the first hurdle.” Another is “a scuffed, sweetly melancholy song about the ‘quite mad’ night at the philosopher girl’s apartment.” (Sample lyric: “Nothing’s gonna last forever/ And no one’s gonna last forever.”) Another song, in Charli’s words, is about how acting makes her feel “something new and undiscovered and something kinda violent”; Snapes compares it to the vulnerable BRAT highlight ‘I think about it all the time’.

This post will be updated…