Charli XCX is no stranger to the movies. Before her post-Brat pivot to the big screen that’s seen her team up with arthouse heroes like Gregg Araki and Takashi Miike — and not to mention co-creating and starring in a film of her own — Charli has dotted her professional career with sugary, on-the-nose soundtrack contributions: “I’m going skiing even when the slopes are closed,” she winked during the rolling end credits of 2022’s slasher comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies. The following year, she made “Speed Drive” for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and co-wrote the music for the coming-of-age teen comedy Bottoms. Just don’t get her started on “Boom Clap.”
Charli’s first record after summer 2024’s zeitgeist-defining Brat is Wuthering Heights, released over Valentine’s Day weekend in conjunction with Emerald Fennell’s film of the same title. One of dozens of screen adaptations of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel — the only novel the English writer published before dying a year later — Fennell’s take is, frankly, a disjointed mess (light spoilers ahead). It’s too hasty to be the erotic thriller that Saltburn fans expected, its humor is too faint even for a black comedy, and it’s too aesthetically underdeveloped to leave any lasting visual impact. I think Fennell wanted to reimagine Wuthering Heights in the vein of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, both thrilling films that toy with contemporary context while remaining faithful to their source material. You have to have a razor-sharp creative point of view in order to pull off that balance. You might have to be someone like Charli XCX.
In the winter that followed Brat Summer, Emerald Fennell reached out to Charli about doing original songs for Wuthering Heights. Charli, understandably overwhelmed thinking about what sort of musical direction she’d take after Brat, said yes. “I think whatever I do next will just inherently be different to Brat because that’s what feels natural,” she said on the Goop podcast last November. “I’m exploring a lot of stuff with strings at the moment, which I’m really enjoying, and I haven’t really worked in that space before.” That same week, Charli released Wuthering Heights’ lead single “House.”
“House,” one of the album’s strongest moments, backdrops the film’s opening scene and has already had its 15 minutes of viral TikTok fame thanks to its brash, foreboding opening lines: “I think I’m gonna die in this house,” Charli repeats in unison with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, who gives a subtly-theatrical spoken word introduction over plunky, screeching strings that wouldn’t feel out of place on Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready. Before the track’s end, though, we’re reminded that this is the same artist behind Brat: Charli’s vocals are distorted into oblivion, and we start to hear the production fingerprints of her frequent collaborator Finn Keane (aka Easyfun) poke through in punchy, programmed percussion.
At some point after Fennell asked Charli to contribute music to Wuthering Heights, Charli raised that request and inquired about making a full-length concept album. From a creator’s standpoint, it’s a brilliant way to follow up Brat. Its ambiguous association with the film invokes inherently lower stakes, but defining it as a “concept album” still grants Charli a considerable amount of creative freedom that a proper soundtrack album might restrict. Most of what we hear in the film Wuthering Heights, for instance, isn’t Charli’s songs but Anthony Willis’ string-laden score.
Across Charli’s Wuthering Heights, however, strings act as a nebulous anchor to the story’s late-18th century setting. She approximates the drama of a full symphony on the album’s centerpiece “Chains Of Love,” where they swirl over metallic production that feels distinctly Charli. On songs like the revved-up, scintillating “Dying For You” or the whimsical “Seeing Things,” those strings nearly take the place of synths texturally. They add a welcome gothic touch on late-album standout “Eyes Of The World,” over which Sky Ferreira’s guest vocals feel right at home, and I like the atmosphere they bring to the Joe Keery co-write “Funny Mouth.”
Having read Fennell’s Wuthering Heights screenplay before writing the album, Charli makes some clear allusions to the film across the album: Lines like “You take me out of myself/ My fingers gripping the floorboards” on the dizzy-in-love “Out Of Myself” make the most sense having seen Fennell’s Cathy and Heathcliffe grip floorboards on screen. But the record’s biggest downfall might be its association to the film: Neither a proper soundtrack album, nor a proper studio follow up to Brat, it’s a good but not particularly memorable stopgap release that’ll almost certainly get overshadowed by whatever musical endeavor Charli does next. Until then, it’s best to think of her Wuthering Heights and Fennell’s movie the same way: Loosely-defined passion projects with some brief allusions to one of history’s most famous love stories. Between the two, Charli pulls it off much better.
