Album Review: Charli XCX, Wuthering Heights

It has taken time, culturally and critically, to put pop music back in the atom smasher, to tease different forms, to dodge the gravity of commercial expectations. Things are changing. Charli xcx is among the obvious signifiers, straddling the line of music above and underground. She's penned polished radio hits, helped pioneer the hyperpop renaissance, and most recently detonated Brat, the album-turned-cultural-phenomenon that was literally everywhere in 2024. In a world post-Brat, the question was never whether she could do it again, but whether she would ever take her pop subversion to new extremes.

After it was announced that Charli would handle the soundtrack to director-provocateur Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, a new era felt imminent. Then came the first single, ‘House’, featuring a stoic John Cale imparting excerpted streams of thought, set to a menacing backing whereupon the wistful crashes headlong into the harrowing. The Moors seem a perfect setting for Charli xcx’s twisted synths and drone-heavy miniatures.

Say what you will of the film adaptation – I’m certainly keeping my cards close to my chest. But make no mistake, this soundtrack is incredible and stands apart from the silver screen. This is far from Brat: The Sequel, and neither is it a reaction against it.

Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights is dark and gothic, taking cues from The Velvet Underground and Nine Inch Nails. Its vision echoes across the entire album, fleshed out by a cast of players that includes experimental music giant Laurie Anderson on viola. A salvo of distorted strings and wires regularly penetrate the songs, as on ‘Wall of Sound’ and ‘Out of Myself’. Meanwhile, the likes of ‘Chains of Love’ and ‘Dying for You’ offer up bespoke chart-worthy tracks.

Wuthering Heights unfolds as a shape-shifting fever dream, reveling in its strange, abrasive textures while never letting go of sharp hooks or plainspoken immediacy. Charli feels far more attuned to the dark, knotted intensity of Brontë’s original vision than its film counterpart; the emotions here aren’t framed with irony or held at arm’s length. They arrive raw and unguarded. The result is a stormy, gothic triumph.