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.<\/p>\n
She has kept the so-called Brat summer of \u201924 going with a superb touring show and media savviness. \u201cI don\u2019t really get to decide when it\u2019s over or not,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The album is, once again, neither one thing nor another. It began life as the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell\u2019s adaptation of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s novel, but has grown into something else, a companion to the film<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n Charli\u2019s Wuthering Heights is being released on the same day that Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d opens. The quotation marks in the film\u2019s title denote the director\u2019s take on the literary classic, a deliberately schlocky erotic melodrama that, judging from its mixed reviews, takes enjoyment in boiling Heathcliff\u2019s character down to exactly seven words from the novel: \u201che has an erect and handsome figure\u201d.<\/p>\n Wuthering Heights the album takes a different approach. Listening to it without having seen the film, or only its trailer, our minds aren\u2019t immediately filled by images of Margot Robbie\u2019s Cathy watching dough being kneaded suggestively or Jacob Elordi\u2019s Heathcliff licking fleshy wallpaper. That gives us space to appreciate Charli\u2019s more sophisticated take on Bront\u00eb\u2019s gothic tale of family dysfunction, sexual taboo and doomed romance. But the album struggles to stand on its own feet.<\/p>\n It begins strongly with the gripping lead single \u201cHouse\u201d. Creaky violins evoke the opening of the rusty gate leading to Heathcliff\u2019s benighted farmhouse on the bleak Yorkshire moor. Velvet Underground grandee John Cale\u2019s weather-beaten voice is the first we hear, speaking of being haunted by a terrible beauty. \u201cI think I\u2019m going to die in this house,\u201d 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 \u201cI\u2019m Cathy, I\u2019ve come home,\u201d in her own \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n The way is thus cleared for Charli to make what she wants of the same source material. Initial results are promising. \u201cWall of Sound\u201d accompanies lyrics about \u201cunbelievable tension\u201d with banks of rising violins reminiscent of the composers Krzysztof Penderecki and Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti. The effect is overused in modern cinema, although Charli successfully transfers it to a pop song setting. \u201cDying for You\u201d is a stirring number about love and death, with shuddering strings and a beat that inexorably, even pleasurably, carries the singer towards the \u201ctragic destiny\u201d that she sings about.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAlways Everywhere\u201d is a windswept ballad in the grand 1980s tradition, with emotive vocals, reverb and gated drums. Lyrics about \u201ca fever dream of mirrored features, hungry eyes\u201d, vividly evoke the novel\u2019s imagery. \u201cChains of Love\u201d is another immaculately stylised ballad. But then the album falters.<\/p>\n \u201cOut of Myself\u201d dramatises the theme of being spellbound with lots of fluttering violins and emphatic synthesiser chords, but the song sacrifices narrative structure for atmosphere. \u201cSeeing Things\u201d sounds like Philip Glass coasting through a standard pop number. \u201cAltars\u201d has a beat that nods to Charli\u2019s lively first solo hit, 2014\u2019s \u201cBoom Clap\u201d, but its tempo is torpid in comparison.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s run of acutely conceived albums, this fairly brief one, lasting just 34 minutes, stands out as the least convincing or fully developed. Wuthering\u00a0Heights is a middling thing, neither fish nor fowl.<\/p>\n \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606<\/p>\n Out now on Atlantic<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-296272","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Charli](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/https:\/\/images.ft.com\/v3\/image\/raw\/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F19aa1a.jpeg\")
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