In the catalogues of rock and pop artists, film soundtracks usually seem like interstitial releases. For every career highlight Shaft or Superfly, there’s a plethora of soundtrack albums that carry the tang of the side-hustle. It was doubtless flattering to be asked in the first place – who doesn’t want to feel like a polymath? – but the results are doomed to languish in the footnotes, alongside the compilations of B-sides and outtakes, where only diehard fans spend extended amounts of time.
But the release of House, the first single taken from Charli xcx’s soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset. In 2024’s Brat, she made an album you could genuinely call era-defining without fear of embarrassment: if an album makes an impact on the US presidential campaign and its title ends up refashioned as an adjective in the Collins English Dictionary, then it’s definitely era-defining.
But Charli has spent the last year declaring said era over, which seems a very smart move indeed – better to release an era-defining album than a career-defining one – and clearly viewed the opportunity to work on a film set out on the wild and windy moors of 19th-century Yorkshire as an opportunity to really move on. As she wryly noted, Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed romance plays out “without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight”.
Certainly, dark, small-g gothic and bearing the influence of Nine Inch Nails, House sounds almost nothing like the music on Brat. John Cale’s impact on the track seems to go far further than his spoken-word guest vocal: there are obvious echoes of the Velvet Underground in its droning strings and shards of feedback. The rest of the Wuthering Heights soundtrack isn’t as dramatic a departure – its Auto-Tuned vocals and plethora of smart pop melodies immediately mark it out as the work of Charli – but nor does House feel like a radical outlier on the album.
Its musical aesthetic – and indeed Cale’s influence – weaves around the other songs here. Ominous drones regularly undercut the songs, as on Wall of Sound or Eyes of the World, the latter a standout collaboration with American singer Sky Ferreira. Strings dominate the sound, creating a sense of friction with the synths and drum machines. They frequently sound jagged and disruptive – Dying for You marries the dynamics of a rave breakdown to occasionally atonal strings; even the Europoppy melody of My Reminder is suddenly dislocated by a discordant flurry. When they aren’t, as on the staccato Seeing Things, it doesn’t feel too much of a stretch to suggest they carry a hint of Cale’s icy baroque pop masterpiece Paris 1919 about them. Elsewhere, on closer Funny Mouth, the kind of industrial metal drums found on House make a reappearance.
Atonal, disruptive, industrial: despite all this, Wuthering Heights isn’t an album likely to alienate Charli’s existing fanbase, who in fairness have already reacted to House’s aural challenges by streaming it 10m times and meme-ing the living daylights out of its horror movie-worthy chorus. The songwriting is uniformly fantastic – she clearly doesn’t view pushing at the boundaries of what she does as any reason to abandon her pop smarts – and furthermore, it works as an album completely independent from the film it’s intended to accompany.
There’s a narrative arc to the songs that doesn’t require a working knowledge of the Wuthering Heights plot: you could simply read them as documenting the rise, fall and emotional fallout from a faintly toxic-sounding, BDSM-y relationship – “push my face into the stone … put the rope between my teeth … please rub the salt in my wounds,” she sings on Out of Myself – that might just as easily be taking place in present-day Basingstoke as on the windswept hills of 19th-century West Riding.
One thing Wuthering Heights really has in common with Brat is a sense of bold self-assurance. You could, if you wished, describe its contents as experimental (they certainly are by today’s pop standards, which don’t tend to go so big on disruptive atonality or monologues by octogenarian art-rock legends) but there’s nothing tentative about them. Moreoever, its confidence never feels misplaced. “My name’s on the cover, but is it a Charli xcx album?” wrote its author in a lengthy Substack post. “I don’t know, nor do I care to find out.” It definitely is: Wuthering Heights feels substantially more than a side-hustle, or a footnote.
