The Strokes were halfway through their set last weekend at Outside Lands 2026 when Julian Casablancas brought a special guest onstage. Namely, as he put it, “Charli motherfucking XCX.” The British pop star joined the quintessential NYC band for “Take It or Leave It,” the closing track on their 2001 classic Is This It, as she and Casablancas traded verses, bringing the perfect amount of big city rock & roll swagger to the Bay Area.
Charli had performed her own set a night earlier at the festival, which is held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. She’s touring in support of Music, Fashion, Film, her new album that beat out the Strokes’ Reality Awaits on the Billboard 200 — a fact that Casablancas had some fun pointing out to the crowd. “We had a great battle,” he told Charli, bowing down to her. “Congratulations, you defeated us in the album sales.” He then gestured to the audience: “Your new queen of everything, Charli XCX.”
It’s a fitting collaboration — not just because Charli already enlisted Casablancas to sing on “Mean Girls” for her 2024 remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, and not because they both sported sunglasses onstage, despite the fact that it was dark outside. What really made this feel like a full-circle moment is the way Music, Fashion, Film drew comparisons to rock bands like the Strokes, specifically in her use of raw guitar riffs, glitchy synths, and all the no-fucks-given, leather-wearing energy that goes with both. What’s more, both Music, Fashion, Film (“Wink Wink”) and Reality Awaits (“Dine N’Dash”) contain spoken-word segments. Alone, together, these two artists have a lot in common. Seeing them perform a song from Is This It together at a festival was so perfectly rock & roll. Right?
Except Music, Fashion, Film is not a rock album, even if its lead single was called “Rock Music.” Charli stressed this in interviews leading up to the release, including in her Rolling Stone cover story, where she expressed her dislike for being categorized as part of any genre (“I find that to be a very old-school notion”). She also waved off the idea that “Rock Music” was just her way of trolling her audience. “I find that things can be earnest and funny at the same time, and they don’t have to exclusively live separately,” she said. “That’s how I feel about a lot of my work, and if people interpret that as trolling, then that’s fine.”
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But when we likened the highlight “Magic Metal Montana” — a heartfelt ode to her longtime collaborator A.G. Cook that basks in stream-of-consciousness lyrics and dizzying, choppy guitar that frequently changes tempo — to the Strokes’ “Soma,” she didn’t have much to say. “Cool,” she replied. She might sound a lot like the Strokes at times on her new album, but she sure didn’t want to talk about it.
So was her surprise appearance for “Take It or Leave It” a classic Charli move, where she leans into the joke? Was she owning the rock music comparisons, or was it purely circumstantial? It’s…hard to explain. But as she told us, there’s no reason why it can’t be all at once, however she envisions it. “I’m of this mindset at the moment that my life will end, as will all of our lives,” she said. “I want to live my life exactly the way that I want to live it, because I don’t get a redo.” There’s not much more rock & roll than that.
