Forget Brat Summer, it’s time to embrace Gothic Girl Winter.

Charli XCX’s next project after last year’s pop blockbuster Brat is contributing several songs to the soundtrack of the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation from Emerald Fennell, Oscar-winning director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman.

Today, we get to hear the first of those tracks — a gothic collaboration with The Velvet Underground founding member John Cale that is a far cry from the brash electro-pop that defined her critically acclaimed 2024 record.

Titled House, the track begins with eerie, scratchy strings and ominous narration from Cale.

“I’m a prisoner, to live for eternity,” the 83-year-old intones in raspy spoken-word. “Am I living in another world? Another world I created? For what!?”

The tense mood eventually builds toward dramatic, guttural guitars as Charli accompanies Cale on what is the closest thing to a chorus:

“I think I’m gonna die in this house.”

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Produced alongside frequent collaborator Finn Keane, House climaxes with industrial beats and distorted vocals, the brooding noise giving way for a final, lonely phrase from Cale: “In every room, I hear silence.”

Both musicians star in the music video, directed by Mitch Ryan and featuring haunting visuals, including a vulture on a leash and Charli XCX pouring candle wax on her skin and tossing her raven-coloured hair around a bedroom.

In a statement shared to X last week, Charli wrote about Emerald Fennell inviting her to be involved with her big-screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights.

“I read the script and immediately felt inspired,” she wrote. “After being so in the depths of my previous album I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite.

“When I think of Wuthering Heights I think of many things. I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the moors, I think of the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit.”

A long-term fan, she added she reached out to Cale after his quote from a Velvet Underground documentary — in which he said any song by the band had to be both “elegant and brutal” — had stuck with her.

“We got connected, we spoke on the phone and wow … that voice, so elegant, so brutal.”

Director defends ‘primal and sexual’ Wuthering Heights adaptation

Wuthering Heights is set to hit Australian screens on February 12, 2026, starring Australians Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

Following the reveal of an erotically charged trailer, the film has drawn criticism over the casting of its leads.

Barbie star Robbie, 35, who also produced Wuthering Heights, plays Catherine Earnshaw, a teenager in the book, while Elordi plays Heathcliff, described in Brontë’s 1847 novel as “dark-skinned”.

Director Emerald Fennell has addressed the backlash, explaining at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in September that she offered Elordi the role because he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”.

On casting Robbie, Fennell added she is “not like anyone I’ve ever met — ever — and I think that’s what I felt like with Cathy”.

“[Robbie] is so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything … She could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind. And that is who Cathy is to me.”

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Fennell also defended her “primal, sexual” adaptation of the literary classic.

“I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book … I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious.

“[It is] an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it.”

Meanwhile, Charli XCX is involved in several upcoming film projects.

She made her acting debut co-starring alongside Lena Góra in Erupcja (Polish for eruption), directed by Pete Ohs and debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year.

Charli will feature in the A24 production The Moment in early 2026. Directed by Aidan Zamiri, the drama is based on an original idea by the pop star and is the first co-production from her production company studio365.

The singer also features in period fantasy film 100 Nights of Hero, horror remake Faces of Death, erotic thriller I Want Your Sex, action adventure comedy Sacrifice and thriller The Gallerist.