{"id":424888,"date":"2026-02-14T05:56:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T05:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/424888\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T05:56:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T05:56:12","slug":"charli-xcx-wuthering-heights-album-is-a-brat-goth-banger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/424888\/","title":{"rendered":"Charli XCX ‘Wuthering Heights’ Album is a Brat-Goth Banger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written for Emerald Fennell\u2019s new film, it’s a fully realized LP that adds another wrinkle to Charli’s always-evolving sensibility<\/p>\n

\n\tOut on the wily, windy moors we roll with Charli XCX<\/a>. Her companion album for director Emerald Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights movie<\/a> is a complete departure from the hyper-drive dance-pop of her 2024 insta-classic Brat<\/a> and its remix LP, Brat and It\u2019s Completely Different But Also Still Brat<\/a>. She threw herself into the spirit of the project with the most wuthering music she\u2019s ever made, noting in a recent interview that she wanted to capture \u201cthis feeling that you get being on the moors, in the sort of bitter cold.\u201d Mission accomplished. This is an album of top-drawer moors-core.<\/p>\n

\n\tWuthering Heights isn\u2019t a soundtrack or a score. It\u2019s a fully realized album, with great songs that add a whole new musical texture to her always-changing sensibility. She didn\u2019t really take the bait of Fennell\u2019s horny<\/a> screenplay, and instead turned in a love letter to the whole Gothic-romantic canon \u2014 from the Bront\u00eb sisters to the second side of Kate Bush\u2019s Hounds of Love to windswept Eighties pop weepers to Nine Inch Nails. The results would make any Cure-addicted teenager or high school English teacher proud.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn that sense, it\u2019s this cutting-edge artist\u2019s most tradition-minded record. The first voice we hear isn\u2019t hers, but the mordant tones of John Cale, the octogenarian icon who pretty much invented goth music 60 years ago with the Velvet Underground. On \u201cHouse\u201d he delivers a slow, spooky poem over ominously moaning strings. The music sounds like it\u2019s about to crash through the floorboards of some decaying Victorian manse as Cale and Charli come together to savor the line \u201cI think I\u2019m gonna die in this house.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of bone-chilling oration that could make Edgar Allen Poe pee himself in terror.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThat sets the tone, and things don\u2019t get much cheerier from there. The bleary \u201cWall of Sound\u201d sucks you into its black pool of droning orchestration as Charli sings, \u201cUnbelievable tension, wall of sound\/No real reason and I can\u2019t escape it.\u201d She\u2019s never been shy about exposing her rawest nerves, and by slowing the music down and stripping away any state-of-the-art pop finery she lets us bask in her distress and dread with a new and deeper sense of intimacy. That doesn\u2019t mean the music gets overly bleak or indulgently dreary. \u201cDying for You\u201d finds her singing about losing gallons of blood and laying down on the road and setting herself on fire \u2014 for love, damn it! \u2014 over a clanging, banging house track. On \u201cChains of Love\u201d she sings about wearing scars like armor over a swooning track that brings to mind sad-Eighties ballad bombast at its best. Sky Ferreira rolls by for a viciously intense cameo on \u201cEyes of the World,\u201d an extreme moment of dramatic excess.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Charli ends the album with a sense of faint dawn creeping in against the gloom. \u201cMy Reminder\u201d is downright pretty, an empathetic synth-pop forget-me-not about making your best sense of a complicated sibling relationship. (A bit of an echo of Heathcliff and Catherine in the book, except without the intimation of any adopted-brother and sister nookie. Wise choice.) She closes it out with the diabolically jarring \u201cFunny Mouth,\u201d reaching through some of the heaviest, doomiest music on the album to tell us, \u201cIf there\u2019s a light, don\u2019t let it go out.\u201d People have been adapting Wuthering Heights for ages, but few people have made it their own the way Charli XCX does here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Written for Emerald Fennell\u2019s new film, it’s a fully realized LP that adds another wrinkle to Charli’s always-evolving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[5357,96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-424888","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-charli-xcx","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-gb","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}