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Last month, Charli xcx began the media campaign for her seventh studio album by giving an interview to Vogue magazine. The ensuing feature caused an impressive degree of online consternation, not because the 33-year-old star had said anything particularly controversial, but because she had suggested that the follow-up to 2024’s Brat would sound markedly different to its predecessor. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said, not unreasonably declining to chase Brat’s vast success by attempting to replicate it. (Although, in fairness, you could have probably worked that out from House, the noisy, experimental collaboration with John Cale she released at the end of last year as the first single from her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights.)

She also played the interviewer a track that contained both “heavily processed guitars” and the lyrics “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”: Vogue duly ran with the idea, trumpeting Charli xcx’s “rock reinvention” in both the headline and on its cover and other news outlets picked up on the story – “CHARLI XCX CONFIRMS ROCK ALBUM”. What one journalist tactfully called “heated discourse online from some fans and artists within the music industry” followed, eventually prompting the singer to respond, posting “a video of me making a song called Rock Music that is not actually rock music which is funny because I never said I was making a rock album”.

The fact an artist can cause controversy by saying her new album is going to sound different to her last album says something depressing about the era in which we live, dominated by streaming services and their algorithms designed to serve listeners more and more and more of the same. Equally, if Charli xcx was executing a pivot towards rock, it would be a remarkably bold move.

In recent years, we’ve become more used to rock artists taking on the trappings of pop – a move that’s encompassed everything from the Auto-Tuned vocals on the late Ozzy Osbourne’s final albums to hardcore punk band Turnstile’s work with Brat producer AG Cook to Sleep Token’s vastly successful stew of progressive metal, electronics, pop and R&B – rather than vice versa. That seems symbolic of the fact that it’s a long time since rock, either of the hard or alt variety, has felt particularly central to the musical conversation. There’s plenty of it still around, some of it is fascinating, but there’s no getting around the fact that the biggest-selling rock albums of recent years have largely contained music that’s decades old, whether by Arctic Monkeys, Linkin Park, Queen or Oasis. A huge pop star proclaiming the dancefloor dead and announcing they’re now making rock music would thus seem ballsy and far-sighted.

But actually listening to the track in question – the first single from the as-yet-untitled new album – it’s pretty clear that isn’t what Charli xcx is saying at all. There are definitely distorted electric guitars here – playing a riff vaguely reminiscent of the one on Hole’s Celebrity Skin – and what seem to be live drums, but Rock Music is unequivocally a pop track. It’s a wilfully plasticky-sounding studio creation – after less than two minutes, it suddenly ends, an electronically manipulated vocal cutting off as if someone has pressed pause – that feels remarkably like someone thumbing their nose at the “authenticity” held dear by the kind of rock fan who might get upset at the news a pop star is dabbling in the genre. No one is likely to get the lyrics confused with those of an earnest paean: they seem to have a lot in common with the wry, arched-eyebrow wit of LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge or the Killers’ Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll than they do with, say, AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) or Kiss’s Rock and Roll All Nite. “Wow, I’m really banging my head, I’m really hurting my neck,” she deadpans at one point. “Yeah, maybe jump off the stage, I hope they catch you today, but if they don’t it’s OK.”

It is very funny, infernally catchy and chaotic in a way that sets it apart from the perfectly turned and written-by-committee approach of 21st-century mainstream pop. It’s far enough removed from the contents of Brat to count as a new direction while maintaining that album’s hugely appealing up-yours attitude. It also makes you very eager to learn what the rest of her new album might sound like, rock or not.