Album of the Week: Charli XCX – Wuthering Heights (Original Soundtrack)

Staff Review

How do you follow up an album like the global phenomenon that was Brat? I guess one way of doing it is not to do it at all. Which is essentially the route Charli XCX has taken thus far. Following the incredible success of that era-defining pop record, Charli has turned her attention to other creative avenues, most notably acting. Fitting, then, that her return to music, 19 months after Brat Summer took the world by storm, arrives in the form of a soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

Such a creative departure may initially raise a few eyebrows, but beyond the hard-partying surface of Charli’s pop songs, a darker, more personal melancholia, has often been the story behind many of her greatest triumphs. Wuthering Heights opens with House, the lead single, featuring a spoken word monologue from Velvet Underground founder John Cale. Droning strings, atonal effects, industrial rhythms and an atmosphere that is more in tune with Nine Inch Nails than 90s rave push the track forward, though with trepidation, before it reaches its climactic conclusion with Charli’s desperate, distorted howls of “I think I’m gonna die in this house.”

The choice of House as a lead single proves a shrewd move, making no bones about the fact that Wuthering Heights will be a very different proposition to what preceded it. If there’s an album in Charli’s back catalogue it most resembles, it is probably 2020’s lockdown record how I’m feeling now, and a similar sense of claustrophobia, escape, and entrapment permeates many of Wuthering Heights’ strongest moments.

The brief but brilliant Wall of Sound talks of tension, pressure, the inability to escape, of being stopped and restricted. Later, the excellent Chains of Love, one of Charli’s finest individual tracks, brings the toxicity at the centre of Emily Brontë’s novel to the fore, inspiring the succinct, poetic refrain “The chains of love are cruel / I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner.” Charli’s ability to echo the palpable emotion of the novel into song with such balance, with restraint and power working in equal measure, is a marvel to behold. Frequently her lyrics demand attention, perhaps more than ever before (they’re even given their own separate zine in LP editions) and her ability to portray the characters’ emotions, and a tangible brutality and desperation of love is one of the record’s most noticeable strengths.

Though darkness pervades much of the album, it’s not all strictly doom and gloom.  The sprightly, pulsing strings of Seeing Things offer intermittent uplift, a sense of joy, even if it ultimately proves to be an illusion. Dying For You delivers the kind of electronic pop Charli delivers better than most, and is without question the closest the record comes to recalling Brat’s euphoric, rave inspired peaks. It’s a strong track and will delight fans looking for more of that era, but Wuthering Heights’ best moments lie where all semblance of Brat has faded. Listeners attuned to Charli’s earlier experimental leanings will likely find much to enjoy here.

Most notably, a rare, highly anticipated collaboration with Sky Ferreira sees her pretty much take the lead on the huge, swirling ballad Eyes of the World. Something of a centrepiece, it employs one of the record’s more complex arrangements, with strings loping and swaying through melodic twists alongside heavily distorted effects and thundering bass. Ferriera previously guested on Cross You Out from Charli (2019), and Eyes of the World, is an immediate highlight.

Closing track Funny Mouth, co-written with Joe Keery and Finn Keane (EasyFun, who produces throughout), combines dark, foreboding strings with glitchy electronic manipulations, before spiralling towards what feels like a premature conclusion, only to reveal ghostly, metallic clangs and scrapes that take us full circle, back to being trapped in that House.

Wuthering Heights is Charli xcx’s album written for Emerald Fennel’s highly anticipated film Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. The album will be released alongside the film on Valentine’s Day 2026.