![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/a55c0d9908bf26d3bcddcb74583a301731-charlixcx-wuthering.rhorizontal.w700.png\")
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\n Emerald Fennell requested a Charli song for the film and ended up with an album just as committed as she is to melding old and modern worlds but much less devoted to popping eyeballs.
\n Photo: Charli xcx via YouTube\n <\/p>\n
Since the world got wind of her acting chops from her autumn 2024 turn as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Charli XCX has rolled out or signed on to at least nine films, including last month\u2019s The Moment<\/a>, an A24-aligned Brat tour mockumentary that attempted an update to Spinal Tap. She had long been respected for a distinct taste that transmuted left-of-the-dial sensibilities into pop nuggets, but Brat<\/a> shattered her reputation as merely a superstar perennially waiting to happen. Now, the 33-year-old is taking different calls and ceding control to the vision of directors. So Charli\u2019s soundtrack for the new remake of Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s tale of heartbreak and class warfare, must hitch its wagon to the provocations of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn\u2019s Emerald Fennell. Her routine lately is imbuing scenes of the past with the sexual frankness of the present, to a sometimes begrudgingly upbeat reception; this week, Fennell\u2019s Wuthering Heights has been celebrated<\/a> as her \u201cdumbest movie\u201d and dragged<\/a> as a \u201cbodice-ripping misfire.\u201d Fennell requested a Charli song for the film and ended up with an album just as committed as she is to melding old and modern worlds but much less devoted to popping eyeballs.<\/p>\n The artist whose last album left us a catchphrase about sniffing coke and the director who needs you to know what a hanged man\u2019s dick<\/a> does when he dies could have connected over dedicated filth. But the \u201c360\u201d singer hangs a 180 for Wuthering Heights, taking more after the stately Kate Bush song about the novel than her own last album. Charli makes good on a promise in a press release to deliver something \u201celegant and brutal\u201d inspired by English \u201cpassion and pain\u201d and the music of the Velvet Underground, since she\u2019d recently watched the 2021 Todd Haynes doc about the international gang of protopunk innovators. John Cale, the band\u2019s pivotal viola player, guests on the opener, \u201cHouse<\/a>,\u201d the lone track that fully rests in the brutal end of the spectrum, its distorted cello and vocals melting into each other ominously. Wuthering Heights is a chance for Charli to workshop an exhilarating musical period piece and taste exercise. She reconnects with her Pop 2 and Number 1 Angel co-producer, Finn Keane, to drizzle 1800s classical aesthetics into gutting love songs. These compositions, built mostly around strings and Charli\u2019s voice, grasp at the same period appropriateness as Jacob Elordi\u2019s very mid-1800s sideburns.<\/p>\n A few tracks after \u201cHouse\u201d wields its cello like a weapon, an orchestra sweetly buttresses ascending vocals in \u201cAlways Everywhere.\u201d Charli\u2019s literally stormy breakup narrative is fleshed out by a cast of players that includes experimental-music titan Laurie Anderson, widow of head Velvet Lou Reed, on viola. The song is instructive of what \u201celegant and brutal\u201d means in Charli\u2019s pocket of the Wuthering Heights project. It doesn\u2019t refer to sex and death; what\u2019s abrasive are the confrontationally loud reverb levels and swirling string lines that make the vocalist seem submerged in water. \u201cChains of Love\u201d sees violins and violas flutter through an ode to love becoming a liability as Charli delivers an echo-drenched hook that feels shouted from a mountaintop: \u201cI shouldn\u2019t feel like a prisoner!\u201d The jittery chordophone stabs that crowd the singer in \u201cOut of Myself\u201d dramatize a feeling of being ripped from one\u2019s familiar social standing. Charli is trying to capture the tormented affection driving Bront\u00eb\u2019s doomed duo of Catherine and Heathcliff, whose romance has been memorialized by everyone from Death Cab for Cutie, whose 2008 Narrow Stairs album honors \u201cCath \u2026,\u201d to Jim Steinman, who wrote C\u00e9line Dion\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s All Coming Back to Me Now\u201d with Bront\u00eb in mind.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Charli\u2019s approach is pointedly British, the idea seemingly being that \u201cthis is what you might hear if this songwriter could perform in a Victorian music hall.\u201d But the album is just as mindful of the pulse of the past couple of years in pop and movie music, where Rosal\u00eda dropped the orchestral wonder Lux<\/a> and Dijon<\/a>\u2019s billowing reverb habits caught on in acclaimed music from Justin Bieber, SZA, and Bon Iver. Anachronistic synth haze is also the theme of Daniel Lopatin\u2019s gorgeous Marty Supreme score<\/a>. Wuthering Heights luxuriates in a quadrant of Charli\u2019s creativity that isn\u2019t the blistering neon Brat main routine, but it works because she has painstakingly hashed out how far off the beaten path a pop song can stray before it loses people. Coming into this Victorian hyperpop project exhausted by the histrionics of Brat summer, Charli disappears into a delicate musical tune-up, as she often does between projects, appearing to dread predictability. (The Moment is a fever dream about a Charli who isn\u2019t allergic to artistic stasis and relishes a rollout that goes on too long; two weeks after the Brat hype parable hit theaters, her mind is already centuries away.)<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s a bit of a stretch to call the almost monastic pop sounds of Wuthering Heights a total curveball, either for the current musical landscape or for a Charli catalogue peppered with precursors to the idea, such as Pop 2\u2019s \u201cLucky\u201d or Charli\u2019s \u201cNext Level Charli.\u201d The excitement here comes from her getting to make high-minded songwriter plays apart from the pressure to drop the glossy follow-up to something that hit worldwide. This is a peek at the bones of a Charli banger. The lilting \u201cSeeing Things\u201d leaves drums off a shouty composition like her Icona Pop smash \u201cI Love It,\u201d and the thumping, shoegazing Sky Ferreira reunion \u201cEyes of the World\u201d (unfortunately no relation to the Grateful Dead classic) picks up where their 2019 \u201cCross You Out\u201d left off, simulating desperation in its languid pacing. \u201cEyes\u201d and the stomping \u201cMy Reminder\u201d feel like callbacks to the mid-tempo synth pop of Charli\u2019s 2013 debut, True Romance; on X, she referred<\/a> to True Romance and the latest as sister albums, reinforcing a sense that Wuthering Heights is not a rejection but a concentration of ideas from elsewhere in her work.<\/p>\n It\u2019s less crass but no less loud; it\u2019s cool-hunting as aggressively as ever if you comb the credits. The pop star who tapped Addison Rae and Julian Casablancas for the Brat remix album here pairs strings by Anderson and a co-write from Djo\u2019s Joe Keery<\/a> on the upbeat, universalist closer, \u201cFunny Mouth.\u201d It may be tempting to call Wuthering Heights Charli\u2019s first power play after an ascension to a higher level of fame, but it\u2019s better to look at it as the product of a 15-year pop-industry veteran inviting herself to box with the classics, to play with her predecessors\u2019 tools.<\/p>\n Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n