Last November, Charli XCX released “House,” the lead single from her new soundtrack Wuthering Heights. Tormented and haunting, the track instantly conjured a dilapidated, abandoned cliffside mansion: Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale lurking in and out of jagged, atonal cello strokes like a spectral presence, pacing and murmuring “I’m a prisoner / To live for eternity” below his breath; Charli XCX herself a restless spirit trapped within the walls, unhooking her jaws to shriek with droning, industrial despair. For Charli, who’d most recently come off the runaway success of 2024’s club-forward brat, the track seemed to stake out an electrifying new sonic direction. Commentators raced to christen the new season that would follow Brat summer: Wuthering Heights winter! Yearning winter! No, goth girl winter!
In Charli’s telling, Wuthering Heights can certainly be seen as a reaction against brat. On her Substack, she recalls burning out by the end of Bratmania, exhausted from touring and performing the same songs over and over again. She was stuck, empty, and creatively depleted. So when English filmmaker Emerald Fennell reached out in late 2024 and sent Charli the script for Wuthering Heights, Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 Gothic novel, Charli latched onto the new material like a lifeline. Fennell floated the idea of having Charli make a song or two for the film; Charli shot back: Why not a whole album? Alongside frequent Charli collaborator Finn Keane (Easyfun), Charli—who is famously adept at working off of vibes—soon got busy crafting the accompaniment to Cathy and Heathcliff’s dark, enduring romance.
Yet, for all the clamor of goth girl winter, Wuthering Heights is curiously more backward-facing than era-defining, often recalling instead flashes of Charli’s past. True Romance, Charli XCX’s moody 2013 art-pop debut album, is the most obvious reference point here, with new wave “My Reminder” almost ghostly reminiscent of “Black Roses.” Wuthering Heights struggles, though, in melding these twin industrial/orchestral and art-pop streaks: despite the frisson-y, tortured strings of “Chains of Love,” “Out of Myself,” and “Seeing Things,” the middle trio of tracks are bogged down by fairly generic alt-pop beats. The orchestral maneuvers here often end up feeling like window dressing, a way of gussying up basic synth-pop tracks with some Gothic flair while failing to lend them real heft and character. “Eyes of the World,” meanwhile, wastes the rare Sky Ferreira feature on meandering, directionless gloss. And while “Wall of Sound” is fine, its chandelier-crash explosion of strings is slightly undercut by the fact that “House” makes the whole wall-of-sound outro bigger and better right before.
But then again, perhaps it’s unfair to judge Wuthering Heights in terms of “eras” and all this parlance that infects the mind of a pop stan (myself included) like a virus. Though Charli has frequently redesigned pop music in her wake, from 2016’s Vroom Vroom EP to the recent brat, Wuthering Heights is first and foremost a soundtrack, and Fennell’s got a movie to make after all. Charli herself has noted that the pleasures of producing Wuthering Heights came from the opportunity to get lost in another world and work within someone else’s constraints. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of this album as a creative exercise than an artistic statement.
And creative exercise or not, Wuthering Heights still yields some beautiful moments. On the lush, wistful “Always Everywhere,” Charli soars over sweeping strings and fluttering synth keys, as if her yearning calls were being carried over the wind and the moors. And “Altars” finds its drama by digging into all the dimensions of Charli’s voice. You can hear how the gravel tumbles around inside her mouth as she drawls out “cry,” how the Auto-Tune renders her animalistic yet wounded in her devotion, how her throat presses up against that damned “baaby” of the chorus, bleeding so many emotions at once: disbelief, desperation, defiance, desire. Fans of tracks like “White Mercedes” have always known that, despite Charli’s grungy, coke-doll/club-rat persona, she can easily write a heartbreaking, breathtaking ballad when she wants to; “Altars” is a shoo-in for the “Charli XCX songs you can cry to” canon.
Still, hearing mournful, clanging closer “Funny Mouth” (co-written, surprisingly enough, by Djo’s Joe Keery) right before looping back to “House” feels like getting a glimpse of the album that could’ve been. Speaking about her intentions for Wuthering Heights, Charli XCX said she wanted to make something that was “elegant yet brutal,” a motto that Cale himself used to describe the Velvet Underground’s sonic philosophy. Yet Wuthering Heights merely leaves a longing for more elegance, more brutality. On “Out of Myself,” Charli sings of the ravaging, destructive domination of love: “Push my cheek into the stone / You take me out of myself.” If only. The album that could’ve been is spelled out there: one that, like the most feverish and unrelenting of love, tortures and tears you open in delight, challenges you and takes you out of yourself, leaving you open, lacerated, raw, and dripping like a wound. Yet so many of Wuthering Heights’s songs feel too easy, especially for Charli XCX of all people. Love is a dangerous game, after all, but here you can’t help feeling Charli is playing it safe.
Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.
