Charli XCX’s Wuthering Heights album is part movie soundtrack, part reset button.

To reverse the Shakespearean maxim, now has our glorious brat summer become a winter of discontent via the wuthering winds of Yorkshire. As seen, that is, in Emerald Fennell’s new loose film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic romance Wuthering Heights, and as heard on the very moody but likeable new Charli XCX album of the same name.

While it partly is a soundtrack to the movie, this short collection of angst-ridden love-and-loss songs is also meant to stand alone as the U.K. singer’s latest release. It’s a clever way for her to follow up her long-awaited career breakthrough with 2024’s Brat, while sidestepping any great expectations for a sequel. One wonders whether she’s thinking of those pressures, not just the ones between doomed lovers Cathy and Heathcliff, when she sings on the album’s second track, “Unbelievable tension, wall of sound / Love and hatred, and I can’t escape it.”

Charli XCX arrives at this phase of her career with a very particular dilemma, having been the pop-demimonde’s alternative auteur since her late teens and then finally becoming famous-famous in her early 30s. She’s now at risk of being washed, of her long-cultivated cool turning to cringe after Brat became a brand, an overexposed iconography—the color, the font, the celeb feuds and reconciliations, all prone to overshadowing the music.

Worse, her summer 2024 rise coincided with the U.S. election season, and one notorious, well-intended tweet entangled Brat with the fortunes of Kamala Harris as she campaigned to become brat-in-chief. Now those intoxicating hopes have aged into a “what were we thinking” hangover, and we are all cast out wandering our own barren moors. While it’s a pleasant memory, a repeat of Brat’s mode of cocaine confessionals and purgative party jams would seem quite inapt for the current mood. And yet for much of the world, that’s really all they know of her. It’s like having made your name playing a character on a smash TV show and then having that show become a bit of a punch line, as happened to the late James Van Der Beek (RIP). One of Charli XCX’s strategies in response is to parody the problem itself in her recent mockumentary The Moment—much as Van Der Beek did when he tried to shake off Dawson’s Creek by playing himself on Don’t Trust the B— in Apt. 23. 

I haven’t seen the Charli doc yet, but most reviews suggest it has at best mixed success at achieving her goal of making a Spice World–like sendup of the absurdity of pop stardom. But even if she didn’t make a great movie, at least she is making a lot of movies—as many as nine of them, reports say, including queer-cinema pioneer Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, indie drama Erupcja, The Gallerist with Natalie Portman, the fantastical romance 100 Nights of Hero (also in the queer-cinema bracket), one directed by Dakota Johnson, a remake of the 1970s fake-snuff “shockumentary” Faces of Death, and a new slasher by Japanese horror master Takashi Miike.

Given that, it makes a lot of sense for her next musical move to come via a cinematic tie-in. She’s had plenty of sync placements in the past, of course—her breakout 2012 hit with Icona Pop, “I Love It,” is practically a screen standard by now, and her track “Boys” was used in Promising Young Woman, Fennell’s 2020 feature directorial debut. But her only previous work on a complete soundtrack was on Bottoms in 2023. While she was still touring Brat, Fennell got in touch to ask for a song for Wuthering Heights, and according to interviews, it was XCX who came back with the counteroffer of a whole album.

She said she was captivated by the script, but no doubt she also saw its usefulness for her post-Brat reset: As someone who’s been the very model of hypercontemporary, why not pivot into a period piece? Suitable to editing to picture, the album is also a chamber piece made up of miniatures, with most of the tracks running less than three and a half minutes, and the whole set of 12 adding up to only 34:40. Fans might want more, but that’s the way to leave ’em.

While, thematically, it drapes itself in 19th-century crinolines, mosses, and capital-R Romanticism, XCX’s Wuthering Heights sound also reaches into her own past and reaffirms her attachment to the avant-garde. In places, it’s reminiscent of her gothy debut album True Romance, elsewhere of 2017’s much-loved Pop 2. This project announced itself in November with the potent “House,” the opening track, which features the octogenarian Velvet Underground violist and Welsh composer John Cale delivering spoken word over scraping strings and industrial soundscapes. I can hardly imagine a clearer way for an artist to declare that she’s more substantial than just her substance-fueled “club classics” and chronicles of shaky self-esteem.

Wuthering Heights does include a couple of attempts at bangers, but they are still downbeat ones, such as the single “Chains of Love” as well as “Eyes of the World,” on which Sky Ferreira rises out of the mists like the ghost of alt-pop careers past, or like Cathy’s spirit haunting Heathcliff in the section of Wuthering Heights that Fennell left out of her film. (Is Charli XCX just doing her old friend a favor, or presenting herself with a cautionary tale?)

Overall I prefer it when this album, created mostly with her frequent collaborator Finn Keane, uses sparer methods to trace its descents into emotional tumult, as on the enveloping “Dying for You”—“All the pain and torture that I went through / All makes sense to me now, I was dying for you.” The tightly repeating cycles of its melody get across the sense of being locked in a pattern of obsession. On some of the other highlights, such as “Almost Everywhere” and “Seeing Things,” we find XCX in a storytelling mode that calls Taylor Swift to mind, but Swift back when she knew better than to use nine words where three could cut to the quick.

On a first night’s listen, I was also drawn to “My Reminder,” which lowers the goth accoutrements like a veil and exposes the warmer side of Wuthering Heights’ central, lifelong, love-hate relationship. Then the closing “Funny Mouth” twists us back into the darkness, with staccato strings accompanied by ratatat beat blasts, and finally seeks to ease us out of the Brontë zone while also universalizing the tale: “Everyone sleeps / Everyone wakes up / Everyone dreams / And everyone breaks up … Will we be all right?”

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In the actual film, except for a couple of scenes, the songs do not stand out as much as I imagined before seeing it—the effect is far from that of the flagrantly anachronistic 1980s needle drops in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, for instance. I found both the score by Fennell’s usual composer Anthony Willis and the repeated use of Olivia Chaney’s version of the Heathcliff-evoking folk ballad “Dark Eyed Sailor” more conspicuous and memorable.

As reviews and Brontë fan outrage have indicated, Fennell’s adaptation is about as unfaithful to the source as her Catherine is to her rich husband Edgar Linton, but that’s to be expected. It is best when most outrageous, but unfortunately perhaps not outrageous enough often enough. The album gets closer than the film does, but I could lodge somewhat the same criticism at it: Having lived with “House” for several months, I was somewhat let down to find there was nothing to equal its audaciousness on the rest of the record. I was hoping something might surpass it.

As it stands, while Charli XCX perhaps has made just the album she needed to now, it remains the case that Wuthering Heights in popular music still belongs completely to Kate Bush’s wily, windy, hot, and greedy 1978 debut single. Now there is someone who, when the outrageous was called for, did not hesitate to provide it, cartwheeling across the threshold of the ridiculous until she flew toward the horizon of the sublime. Be a saucy brat and you’re the toast of a season, but that cool soon turns cold. Be a sacred monster like Bush, and like Brontë’s original Catherine and Heathcliff, and you can burn forever.

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