And apocalypse, too: “Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell,” Charli sings on the album’s second single.
If there is one thing Charli XCX does flawlessly, it is moving faster than expectation.
With Rock Music, she delivers a perfectly engineered hit of nostalgia and misdirection: a video directed by Aidan Zamiri, stacked with classic rock clichés, and a distorted chorus: “I think the dance floor is dead, so now we’re making rock music.” Just enough time for guitar purists and club loyalists to argue it out on X over whether this signals a real shift or not, and then the pivot lands.
On May 18, she teases the release on Substack, even spoiling the lyrics. Then, without letting the moment settle, she drops SS26.
Produced with A.G. Cook and Finn Keane (EASYFUN), the track flips everything into place. Where Rock Music is abrasive and analog, SS26 is a cold techno-pop structure, devouring the language of high fashion to stage an existential warning.
The lyrics read like distilled glamour nihilism:
“Spring Summer 26 / When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it / Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell.”
Cook and Keane build a sterile, metallic techno bed that feels like a fashion show sealed inside an underground bunker, hyper-exclusive, airtight, while the outside world burns.
The apocalyptic tone fully materialises in the video directed by Aidan Zamiri, alongside the voyeuristic eye of Torso, the duo formed by Miodrag Manojlović and Lukas von Haller, where a runway show slowly unravels into chaos.
For lore-watchers, there’s an immediate meta reference: the shot sliding across the scarred floor, recalling the asphalt-industrial aesthetic of Von Dutch (2024).
At the centre of the project is a dystopian fashion remix curated by stylist Juan Corrales. In Oliver Peoples sunglasses, Charli shifts look at every step of the runway, moving through archive pieces from The Archive X Yana, the gothic restraint of Ann Demeulemeester, and Chrome Hearts detailing.
The wardrobe is deliberately unstable, cutting between the deconstructed tailoring of Javier Guijarro and Daniil Antsiferov, the conceptual worlds of Raimundo Langlois and Lou de Bètoly, and the luxury codes of Balmain, YSL, Khaite, and Zadig & Voltaire.
A form of apocalyptic power dressing that sits somewhere between quiet luxury and bourgeois excess.
The tone of the entire operation is distilled by Carine Roitfeld, former editor of Vogue Paris, acting as a pop oracle, delivering the final verdict in French: “Fashion will not save us, but we go on the runway and we walk.”
What follows is a tightly curated, fetishistic casting: a full ecosystem of Paris and beyond, lined up in alphabetical order, from Abra to Anthony Vaccarello, through Baby Deva, Benjamin Barron, Bror August Vestbø, Carine Roitfeld, Ceval, Dan Sablon, David Siwicki, Debra Shaw, Farida Khelfa, Gian Gisiger, Lucien Pagès, Lyas, Michel Gaubert, Nhu Duong, Patrik Sandberg, Ryan Aguilar, Victoria Sekrier, and Zac Ching.
All of it under the semi-documentary gaze of Loïc Prigent.
What Charli is doing here feels like a reversal of early-career rejection. In her early days, brands and PR teams often refused to dress her, forcing her to buy outfits herself for red carpets.
Now, the shift from the chaotic, party-girl energy of the Brat era to what is being called her “model era” reveals a precise command of cultural systems.
With her creative network, Charli XCX seems to understand that surviving the collapse speed of the music industry requires a runway oriented toward the future, one that leads straight into the fire.
Dressed accordingly.
