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Until now, being neither one thing nor the other has suited Charli XCX. For most of her career she was a British outsider with a cult following and the odd hit. Being at the fringes of pop’s elite was frustrating to her: I recall her crying out, “I’m ahead of my time” at a London gig in 2019, as much in a tone of impatience as pride. But the slanted angle to the charts kept her razor-sharp.
Brat was the moment in 2024 when it all came together. The Warholian conceptualist who was fascinated by fame but also wanted to be really famous became exactly that. Her arthouse take on chart-pop, known as hyperpop and honed in the laboratory of the pioneering record label PC Music, went mainstream. The album played the chords of the good-girl-gone-bad archetype that runs through popular culture and folklore with knowingness and depth. It triggered the domino chain of online virality, cultural commentary, tabloid celebrity: the lot.
She has kept the so-called Brat summer of ’24 going with a superb touring show and media savviness. “I don’t really get to decide when it’s over or not,” she said last year. The point is astute, but its open-endedness makes planning what to do next a problem. Wuthering Heights is her response.
The album is, once again, neither one thing nor another. It began life as the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, but has grown into something else, a companion to the film: a proper album so to speak, the follow-up to Brat. It arrives as part of a sideways move into cinema. Charli has no fewer than seven films on the go, a risky act of saturation, including the Brat mockumentary The Moment, released next week.
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Charli’s Wuthering Heights is being released on the same day that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” opens. The quotation marks in the film’s title denote the director’s take on the literary classic, a deliberately schlocky erotic melodrama that, judging from its mixed reviews, takes enjoyment in boiling Heathcliff’s character down to exactly seven words from the novel: “he has an erect and handsome figure”.
Wuthering Heights the album takes a different approach. Listening to it without having seen the film, or only its trailer, our minds aren’t immediately filled by images of Margot Robbie’s Cathy watching dough being kneaded suggestively or Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff licking fleshy wallpaper. That gives us space to appreciate Charli’s more sophisticated take on Brontë’s gothic tale of family dysfunction, sexual taboo and doomed romance. But the album struggles to stand on its own feet.
It begins strongly with the gripping lead single “House”. Creaky violins evoke the opening of the rusty gate leading to Heathcliff’s benighted farmhouse on the bleak Yorkshire moor. Velvet Underground grandee John Cale’s weather-beaten voice is the first we hear, speaking of being haunted by a terrible beauty. “I think I’m going to die in this house,” Charli screams in tandem with his speech as a huge synth tone looms like the blackest cloud. It briefly blots out the memory of Kate Bush singing “I’m Cathy, I’ve come home,” in her own “Wuthering Heights”.
The way is thus cleared for Charli to make what she wants of the same source material. Initial results are promising. “Wall of Sound” accompanies lyrics about “unbelievable tension” with banks of rising violins reminiscent of the composers Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti. The effect is overused in modern cinema, although Charli successfully transfers it to a pop song setting. “Dying for You” is a stirring number about love and death, with shuddering strings and a beat that inexorably, even pleasurably, carries the singer towards the “tragic destiny” that she sings about.
“Always Everywhere” is a windswept ballad in the grand 1980s tradition, with emotive vocals, reverb and gated drums. Lyrics about “a fever dream of mirrored features, hungry eyes”, vividly evoke the novel’s imagery. “Chains of Love” is another immaculately stylised ballad. But then the album falters.
“Out of Myself” dramatises the theme of being spellbound with lots of fluttering violins and emphatic synthesiser chords, but the song sacrifices narrative structure for atmosphere. “Seeing Things” sounds like Philip Glass coasting through a standard pop number. “Altars” has a beat that nods to Charli’s lively first solo hit, 2014’s “Boom Clap”, but its tempo is torpid in comparison.
The songs have been made with Finn Keane, a regular collaborator dating back to her PC Music days. They effectively transport her distinctive musical character into an orchestral cinematic soundscape. But after Charli’s run of acutely conceived albums, this fairly brief one, lasting just 34 minutes, stands out as the least convincing or fully developed. Wuthering Heights is a middling thing, neither fish nor fowl.
★★★☆☆
Out now on Atlantic