Charli XCX Wuthering Heights

As Charli XCX continues to put her tentacles in all facets of the film industry, the arrival of the Wuthering Heights Soundtrack aims to make it apparent that she means what she says when declaring that she enjoys “world-building” with filmmakers (and, of course, in general). As for writer-director Emerald Fennell sending Charli the script to read as if guided by an invisible hand to do so, it now seems like “divine pop culture intervention.” And though Fennell only had the intention of asking her to provide one song for the film, it was XCX who cooked up the notion of doing an entire album for it. A “ballsy” move, to some, but for Charli, it seemed an opportunity to get excited about music again by diving into a universe that she deemed to be the total opposite of Brat, which had taken over her entire existence by the end of December 2024, when Fennell initially reached out.

Recalling her thoughts while reading the script that first time, Charli stated, “I began to sink into this reimagined world of Wuthering Heights and I suddenly began to feel…inspired. I was immersing myself in a story that was not my own, a story that was steeped in history, a story that had existed since 1847 (tysm Emily Brontë). I was purely a voyeur and I was enjoying being one. The language of this world felt so opposite from the world I had been inhabiting for the past 2 and a half years. I began to feel a sense of freedom again.” And it’s a freedom that announces itself immediately with the first song, “House” featuring John Cale. A track that amounts to XCX taking a torch to her Brat era with something as auditorily assaultive, as “anti-party” as this. Or, what Charli has taken to calling “elegant and brutal” in honor of John Cale’s philosophy on how The Velvet Underground wrote their songs. And yes, it’s no secret that said band has been an inspiration to XCX for a while now, with Charli mentioning that Brat particularly has its roots in Reed’s “conversational” style of lyric-writing, complete with name-checking the people in his universe. Charli, of course, would do the same throughout Brat, bringing up everyone from Julia Fox to George Daniel to SOPHIE. For the Wuthering Heights Soundtrack, however, it was all about jettisoning herself from, well, herself. Tapping into someone and something other than “Charli XCX” and “Brat.”

The kismet timing of Fennell contacting her is also something XCX expressed creative gratitude for, remarking, “When Emerald approached me with an open mind and a total willingness for me to explore I thought… ok I can do something cool here. I can write songs from a different perspective and I can think about these songs as purely serving the film they’ve been written for. For me that’s a totally different approach and finding a new approach always feels like a lifeline to a new way of creating.” One that left her feeling liberated enough to experiment, to veer away entirely from the sound that had “miraculously” gotten her embraced by the mainstream for the second time in her career, ten years after the success of her sophomore album, Sucker, and its signature hit, “Boom Clap.” “House” is very much the apex of that experimentation, which is why it’s a bold move to not only feature it as track one, but to have released it as her first post-Brat single. Though she seemed keen to “correct” any misconceptions that this might be her full-on “new sound” by releasing “Chains of Love” just three days later (this being the number that gets played during the film’s trailer as well). It was this single, in addition to “Wall of Sound,” which succeeds “House” on the record, that had critics and fans alike remarking on the sonic similarity to her debut, True Romance.

Charli herself admitted to the undeniable correlation, commenting, “When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points.” Because, in order to recognize who you are (and “how you’re feeling now”), you have to recognize where you’ve come from—this, too, being a topic addressed on one of the soundtrack’s later numbers, “My Reminder.”

As for OG Charli fans, they’ll need no reminder as to why she’s been at this “officially” for over a decade (with True Romance released in 2013) as they listen to the “unbelievable tension” of her “monolithic” wall of sound continue to evolve on this record. With track three, “Dying For You,” exhibiting a marked evolution from a song like True Romance’s “So Far Away,” which commences with a resigned-to-her-fate Charli XCX urging, “Give me the poison/All of the poison.” This echoes her “from Catherine’s perspective” lyrics on “Dying For You” when she says, “‘Cause you’re the poison I drink/I drink you twice to be sure.” This masochistic form of loving someone definitely outdoes “So Far Away” in terms of Charli ramping up the self-flagellating imagery, including the repetition of saying, “I’d set myself on fire” as she also essentially did on “Chains of Love” (singing, “I’d rather set myself on fire”). But she doesn’t stop there, further insisting, “Yeah, you’re my favorite jewelry worn just like a noose around my neck/I’m losing gallons of blood, the river’s turning to red” and “I find the highest building just to fall on my sword.” The “upbeat,” danceable rhythm counteracts the self-harming nature of these sentiments, transforming them into something that passes as romantic thanks to the lush production stylings of Finn Keane, who emulates what Ariel Rechtshaid and Patrik Berger achieved on True Romance with his own take on it.

The same goes for the heartstring-pulling “Always Everywhere,” which features an accompanying music video worthy of the drama—the sheer haunting—conveyed by the song. Offering, as many of these tracks do, simple lyrics oft-repeated to convey deep emotions. In this case, it’s Charli lamentingly restating, “Always everywhere/Always everywhere/Yeah, you’re everywhere” (try not to think of Michelle Branch saying, “‘Cause you’re everywhere to me/And when I close my eyes, it’s you I see”). Of course, there are other, more varied lyrics throughout the soundtrack that get across XCX’s a.k.a. Catherine’s sense of yearning, burning and even rejection. This elucidated by the verse, “A fever dream of mirrored features, hungry eyes/I feel like home, still, you pull away/You disappear to somewhere dark, so far away/I can’t escape the storm you gave me/Constant lightning in my veins (please note: the superior use of lightning metaphors in this song compared to, say, Taylor Swift’s “Opalite”). Indeed, if anyone knows about lightning, it’s XCX, who titled one of her songs after that very weather phenomenon on Crash.

Tonally, the musical sound of “Always Everywhere” transitions seamlessly into “Chains of Love,” which finds XCX continuing to gradually (but forcefully—or elegantly, but brutally, if you prefer) escalate the cinematic nature of her music for this particular album. Channeling the kind of “can’t live without each other love” that Carrie Bradshaw was going on about to Aleksandr Petrovsky (and yes, “Chains of Love” also embodies the kind of toxic amour that Carrie had with Big), Charli expresses, “My face is turning blue/Can’t breathe without you here.” The pain of this kind of love gives way to pain-pleasure on “Out of Myself” (its title recalling the ditty that Charli recorded with Tove Lo and Alma for Pop 2: “Out of My Head”). A song that could have also easily found itself on the Fifty Shades of Grey Soundtrack, what with all the softcore BDSM imagery that Charli evokes with lyrics like, “Put the rope between my teeth,” “Please run the salt in my wounds” and “Push my cheek into the stone” (very “gothic porn” indeed). And yet, despite the ostensible violence of this relationship, XCX still claims (as Catherine), “I like the person you turn me to.” Probably because, ultimately, Heathcliff “takes her out of herself.” After all, what’s worse than being trapped inside one’s own body alone with their thoughts? At least with the distraction of carnal desire, it’s somewhat easier to forget one’s cares or concerns…even if only for a few passionate minutes.

To persist with the motif of commanding and dominating someone, the title of the next song is “Open Up,” a more slowed-down number that is less of a song and more of an “interlude” (though it doesn’t claim to be one). Clocking in at just one minute and twenty-seven seconds, its purpose is, above all, to get across more of a “vibe”—an “aura”—than to actually “say something.” Instead, all Charli does say over and over is, you guessed it, “Open up.” This in between some ambient noises she makes to layer the vocals. The lulling effect of this then allows the listener to be slightly jarred by the harder, jauntier-sounding “Seeing Things.” A song that explores a similar theme to “Always Everywhere” in that Charli-as-Catherine keeps imagining her lover’s presence in her proximity wherever she seems to go. Painting a picture in that Brat/Lou Reed storytelling way, Charli begins with, “It was in the winter/On a busy crossroads/Saw a man about your height/Just walking/Same kind of shoulders/Same kind of new clothes/Couldn’t believe it, so I chased you down fast/And I caught up/And I stopped/And tapped your arm/And waved and said hello/But it was just a stranger.”

The disappointment of that particular kind of, er, moment (since XCX is all about The Moment) is one that many can relate to. And one that does tend to occur when you still haven’t been able to put that “special someone” out of your mind. As Catherine never will when it comes to Heathcliff…and vice versa. The almost merry string arrangement (of the type that makes this seem like it could be a song for Bridgerton as much as Wuthering Heights) belies the sadness of being perennially haunted by another. To be sure, Charli even outright compares this person to a specter, declaring, “You’re a ghost now.” But surely a very hot one—hence, being unable to forget about him.

In fact, she might just have to build several “Altars” to him in some supernatural bid to conjure him back to an earthly state. Except that, on “Altars,” the sentiment conveyed isn’t actually one of “worshipfulness” toward their (Catherine and Heathcliff’s) love, but rather, a revelation that it’s a love no longer worthy of such near-religious reverence. So it is that Charli-as-Catherine can at last understand, “Got me turning far away from you/I’m at your altar, baby/I once believed, I once believed I was free/I’m at your altar, baby/Now I can see/You’re gonna end up killing me.” Because, yes, for as romanticized as this novel is, anyone without a “teenage sensibility” (which Fennell was very much trying to capture in creating this adaptation) would be hard-pressed to find this “genre” of emotions appealing after a few hours, let alone a lifetime. Which is why “Altars” is more indicative of the second half of Wuthering Heights, when Heathcliff starts to go into full “villain mode,” leading Catherine to realize, “One is not the loneliest number/Won’t keep putting all my faith in you” and, most importantly, “I must only be one.” Though, of course, she didn’t feel the need to “be one” when money was involved, opting for the “smarter” choice of marrying Edgar Linton, a man of higher social standing, though she would have preferred to follow her heart rather than her snobby head.

And yet, it’s her heart that keeps winning out with regard to ruling her feelings. This much is emphasized on the track that follows “Altars.” One that offers a faint trace of the moody, irascible “House” strings, which can initially be heard during the brief musical intro of “Eyes of the World.” And perhaps that’s by design since Charli holds Sky Ferreira, the featured artist on the track, in the same high esteem as she does John Cale (as proved by how her brief interview about choosing between Rihanna and every other pop star under the sun only had Ferreira beating out the Barbadian billionaire). Undoubtedly, it’s not only a joy to see this pair collaborate again (having previously done so on “Cross You Out” from 2019’s Charli), but also to see that Ferreira appears to be that much closer to releasing Masochism, her much-teased sophomore album (following Night Time, My Time, which came out the same year as True Romance).

Considering that XCX and Ferreira have worked with the same collaborators, namely Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen, it’s long been obvious that they share a musical chemistry. And for their second song together, this “synergy” shines through more than ever, though it takes a bit of time for Ferreira to “insert herself” into the song. Before doing so, she gives XCX the chance to say her piece with such lines as, “No matter what I do, no matter what I say/You’re gonna think the things you think about me anyway [this pair of lines sounding decidedly “Sympathy is a knife” remix-coded]/Put my flesh upon the cross until I scream.” Ah, that masochistic imagery again (and who better to help describe it than the woman that might, one of these days, release an album called Masochism? Not to mention someone who also wrote a song for Babygirl called “Leash”).

XCX then proceeds to belt out the ardent chorus (which Ferreira will eventually get to do as well), “Ooh, the eyes of the world/Keep me believing in what I see, oh/Oh, the eyes of the world/Keep me believing in you and me/Oh, the eyes of the world/Eyes of the world/Set me free.” It’s finally around the one-minute-forty-two-second-mark that Ferreira gets her opportunity to layer on the doom and gloom, chiming in with that indelible deadpan voice, “I let the fire rush straight to my head/Sabotage to prove I meant what I said/You’re gonna love me like I’m already dead.” This being, of course, an undeniable reference to what happens to Catherine in the novel. Cause of death? Why, Heathcliff…naturally.

He who will forever serve as Catherine’s reminder. Of what love could be, of love lost and of where she came from. It’s the latter point that the penultimate track, “My Reminder,” addresses as XCX-channeling-Catherine sings (in a somehow resigned-but-exuberant tone), “You’re always my reminder/Of where I started from.” Soon after, she assures, “I’m not gonna be your bitter rival/We grew together in the same four walls/This competition and this tension so strong.” The word “tension” finding its way back again after also appearing in “Wall of Sound.” And, since that song was placed at the beginning of the record, its “lovey-dovey” sentiments now seem worlds away from what the listener is exposed to as the soundtrack draws to a close. With one key lyric of “My Reminder” perhaps summing it up best with, “I don’t hate you, I love you too much.” The fine line between love and hate, and all that rot.

Though XCX has been plenty deft at exploring the more hate-oriented side of love, as evidenced by a track like “Yuck,” which happens to be a favorite of Joe Keery’s a.k.a. Djo. That Djo expressed his admiration for XCX’s musical stylings well before the Brat era is also perhaps what endeared him enough to her to sanction a collaboration (even if only a “behind the scenes” one). And after publicly solidifying their mutual appreciation for each other by co-presenting the award for Best Original Score and Best Original Song at the Golden Globes, Keery showing up as a co-songwriter on “Funny Mouth” is hardly a “curveball.”

What is, however, might be how “Funny Mouth” has all the trippy, surreal hallmarks of a Djo song (with some Tame Impala influence in there as well, himself an influence on Djo—as the “Loser” video proved), slightly “glitching out” around the one-minute-twelve-second mark as the sound takes different shapes (including another stabbing-string-à-la-“House” shape), eventually concluding on a serene, almost surrendering note as Charli reiterates, “Everyone sleeps/And everyone wakes up.” As if to say that such a love as the one between Catherine and Heathcliff is, whether viewed as a dream or a nightmare, something that can’t last. Something that one has to wake up from sooner or later.

Even so, Charli-as-Catherine still has to beg/inquire, “If there’s a light, don’t let it go out/Take it in stride, put your foot in your mouth/Will we be alright?” The answer, as most know, is a resounding, No! Even so, it’s hard to tear oneself away from this repackaged version of the tale in sonic form. In truth, that XCX started to craft these songs based solely on her reading of the script is indicative of just how, er, instrumental she was to helping Fennell with cementing the “vibe” she wanted to get across with this film.

As for Fennell reaching out to XCX with the script in the first place, she stated during an interview with Fandango, “I’ve been just obsessed with Charli since, you know, since I first heard her first music, I was just fascinated by her, she was so clearly a genius, so clearly singular. And her music has just always been so, um, meaningful to me. And so much so that when I wrote Promising Young Woman, the first song of it is ‘Boys’ and it was in the script. And so I kind of, you know, asked if I could use it.” This marking their first interaction, and foretelling this much larger film and music merging of the minds later down the road.

At one point during the Fandango interview, Fennell uses the word “witchiness” to describe how she chose to put which Charli song (having such an unexpected abundance to choose from) to what scene. And it’s also a word that can describe Charli’s ability to crystallize the feelings and overarching motifs of Wuthering Heights into a pop song format. A feat that some of the snootier ilk likely wouldn’t praise. But for those who can recognize that pop music is a kind of literature unto itself, it isn’t difficult to see that what XCX has done with the Wuthering Heights Soundtrack is nothing short of impressive. And, most importantly, emotionally affecting.

But Charli has remained largely modest about it from the start of its announcement, writing, “This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli XCX album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out. All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now…” So if this is what artistic freedom sounds like, it’s highly questionable that more music industry string-pullers (of the non-orchestral variety) don’t advocate for it more vehemently.

It’s a question the kind of question that could also be asked of a toxic, overly possessive lover. And, in that regard, as for the album being released on Friday the 13th—just missing the mark for Valentine’s Day—well, it’s also emblematic of a love that is far more terrifying than it is romantic.