Charli XCX’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Album Is a Brat-Goth Banger

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

Wuthering Heights isn’t a soundtrack or a score. It’s a fully realized album, with great songs that add a whole new musical texture to her always-changing sensibility. She didn’t really take the bait of Fennell’s horny screenplay, and instead turned in a love letter to the whole Gothic-romantic canon — from the Brontë sisters to the second side of Kate Bush’s 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.

In that sense, it’s this cutting-edge artist’s most tradition-minded record. The first voice we hear isn’t 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 “House” he delivers a slow, spooky poem over ominously moaning strings. The music sounds like it’s about to crash through the floorboards of some decaying Victorian manse as Cale and Charli come together to savor the line “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” It’s the kind of bone-chilling oration that could make Edgar Allen Poe pee himself in terror.  

That sets the tone, and things don’t get much cheerier from there. The bleary “Wall of Sound” sucks you into its black pool of droning orchestration as Charli sings, “Unbelievable tension, wall of sound/No real reason and I can’t escape it.” She’s 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’t mean the music gets overly bleak or indulgently dreary. “Dying for You” finds her singing about losing gallons of blood and laying down on the road and setting herself on fire — for love, damn it! — over a clanging, banging house track. On “Chains of Love” 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 “Eyes of the World,” an extreme moment of dramatic excess. 

But Charli ends the album with a sense of faint dawn creeping in against the gloom. “My Reminder” 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 “Funny Mouth,” reaching through some of the heaviest, doomiest music on the album to tell us, “If there’s a light, don’t let it go out.” People have been adapting Wuthering Heights for ages, but few people have made it their own the way Charli XCX does here.