Label: Atlantic | Launched: February 2026 | Score: 9/10
The cigarettes are gone. The sun shades are gone. The inexperienced is gone. No matter Charli XCX inbuilt 2024, and she or he constructed one thing genuinely uncommon, a file whose title turned a Collins English Dictionary entry, whose color palette infiltrated a US presidential marketing campaign, she has walked away from it with out trying again.
That self-awareness is a part of what makes Wuthering Heights so disarming. She didn’t wait to be dethroned. She burned the set down herself.
What changed it’s stranger and significantly extra fascinating than anybody anticipated from a movie soundtrack.
What Wuthering Heights Really Is
When Emerald Fennell approached Charli to jot down a single for her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, producer Finn Keane and Charli turned the temporary right into a full companion album.
Twelve tracks. Simply over half-hour. The guiding slogan, borrowed from John Cale’s said purpose in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground documentary, was “elegant and brutal.”
That phrase was adopted because the file’s mission. It holds.
The result’s pop in classical drag. Strings dominate: cello blasts, jagged preparations, occasional icy baroque passages, however the hooks are Charli’s and the electronics are hers.
This isn’t a compositional experiment. The novelty sits within the friction between these two impulses: the string preparations grind in opposition to the synths, the drum machines sit awkwardly beneath orchestral swells, and reasonably than smoothing these edges, Charli and Keane lean into them.
Finn Keane, largely identified from True Romance-era periods, takes centre stage right here in a means no collaborator has since A.G. Prepare dinner stepped again.
There’s a craftedness to the sound design that goes past utility: the organs on “Out of Myself,” the piano break in “Seeing Issues,” the best way the strings on “Humorous Mouth” open languidly earlier than the drums detonate beneath them.
That is additionally a sister file to True Romance, her 2013 debut, not simply sonically however structurally.
Justin Raisen, who produced and wrote on that album, returned right here. She hasn’t reheated something. She’s returned to a mode she deserted, approached it from the opposite aspect of twelve years, and located it nonetheless has issues to say.
Monitor by Monitor
Home (ft. John Cale) opens with ominous orchestral electronics: grating, grand, designed to unsettle.
We reviewed it in depth when it dropped because the lead single, however in album context it hits in a different way: a declaration of intent reasonably than a shock.
John Cale’s spoken-word narration, historic and craggy in opposition to the full-bodied cello blasts, poses questions on magnificence and eternity earlier than Charli joins him in “I believe I’m gonna die on this home.” The home isn’t a constructing. It’s a relationship. A lure constructed from shared origin.
Wall of Sound is the place the album finds its emotional centre early. The strings really feel lovely and angelic and but one thing darkish remains to be transferring beneath them.
A YouTube commenter described it as “brat nevertheless it’s horror so it’s not brat, it’s Wuthering Heights,” which by chance captures the album’s pivot higher than most formal criticism has.
Lyrically, the monitor captures being overwhelmed by an inescapable emotional pressure: paralysed, unable to behave, pleading for somebody to interrupt by means of. The outro is purposefully muffled. The sound has received. She’s been swallowed.
Dying for You is available in swinging and remembers the frenetic power of “Celebration 4 U.” It features as a rave anthem in a Gothic setting, the drums clanging in opposition to the strings in precisely the best way a rave breakdown shouldn’t work and someway does.
The lyrical logic is unflinching: each occasion of self-destruction, being a gun to the top, a wound within the chest, jewelry worn like a noose, was secretly propelling her towards one individual.
By the refrain, the struggling isn’t meaningless. It was preparation. She’s been dying for all of it alongside. She’ll maintain dying for it, smiling by means of the blood loss.
At all times In every single place is the album’s emotional peak, arriving with out warning. The supply, gradual and regular, frames a lover who has leaked into each ingredient of the pure world: hillside shadows, rain-soaked echoes, water that displays two faces changing into one.
Black flowers burn. Violet fades to gray. By the point the refrain arrives, it’s not lacking somebody. It’s being haunted by them.
The storm they left behind has hardwired itself into her veins, and there’s no surgical procedure for that. Probably the greatest songs she has ever written.
Chains of Love we coated in full right here. Vocally it’s the strongest efficiency on the file.
The best way it sweepingly maps the sensation of being certain to a love that’s merciless and perverse, discovering reduction solely within the concept of changing into that individual’s everlasting shadow, makes it a lead single for a cause.
Out of Myself is a deep favorite. The layering of organs, violin and drums produces one thing unmistakably nostalgic, not in an inexpensive means, however in the best way a selected odor transports you with out warning.
Charli explores the ecstatic give up of shedding id inside a consuming relationship, ache and pleasure changing into indistinguishable.
The imagery is visceral: gripping floorboards, rope between enamel, salt rubbed into wounds. “Who am I? Am I your woman?” hangs unanswered all through.
By the outro, the mantra-like repetition of “you’re taking me out of myself” has stopped being lament and began being prayer.
Open Up arrives as an interlude and does the work of a full music in half the time. It feels countless in the very best means, a breath held between chapters.
Seeing Issues pivots to one thing extra accessible, girly pop on the floor, the piano part doing quiet structural work beneath, whereas the lyrical framework stays grief-saturated.
Phantom sightings at winter crossroads. A person in a window who dissolves on method.
Every recognition that it was only a stranger lands like a small loss of life. The outro’s repetition of “to search out you” transforms from confession to incantation.
Altars is the file’s darkest emotional flip. If “Born to Die” and BRAT had a baby it could sound one thing like this.
Spiritual imagery frames devotion turned poisonous: kneeling, crying, trying to find proof at a silent altar.
The refrain inverts the acquainted adage with devastating readability: “One will not be the loneliest quantity” turns into a declaration of independence, a refusal to maintain burning at another person’s shrine.
The outro’s “I have to solely be one” lands not as resignation however as survival. The sound of somebody dismantling their very own worship and strolling out.
Eyes of the World (ft. Sky Ferreira) carries the album’s most vital collaboration. Ferreira’s gritty alt-pop vocals have been absent from music lengthy sufficient that her look right here carries actual weight.
The chemistry she confirmed with Charli on “Cross You Out” from how i’m feeling now is again, however in a darker register.
The manufacturing, a heavy brittle synth association that reads each historic and futuristic, creates area for 2 views of a divided soul.
The biblical imagery is unflinching: flesh upon the cross, projections planted within the thoughts. Being perceived as crucifixion.
The vocal swap between verse one (Charli entrance, Sky backup) and verse two (reversed) is a structural determination that earns its maintain. Thematically it nods again to “I Blame Myself”: the dread of being seen too clearly by somebody who received’t look away.
My Reminder has been extensively misinterpret as a romantic monitor. It’s a few sibling. Somebody who knew you earlier than you turned your self and can at all times measure you in opposition to that authentic model.
The interspersed jarring cinematic strings give it an idiosyncratic texture that lifts it above the breakup-song register most listeners assign it. “I’ll by no means show you incorrect” isn’t romantic defeat.
It’s the quiet tragedy of blood-bound notion: you might be who you have been in these 4 partitions, and no quantity of distance adjustments the best way they see you. “We’re simply totally different now” does extra harm than something louder on the file.
Humorous Mouth closes all the things. It begins languidly, barely transferring, earlier than the drums arrive and detonate in opposition to the strings.
“Unfunny phrases out of your humorous mouth” captures the particular ache of being wounded by somebody you’re keen on saying one thing careless.
“Are you man sufficient to compromise?” asks the tougher query. The philosophy of the refrain is light and earned: don’t let the sunshine exit. Take the missteps. Belief “we’ll be alright.”
By the outro, “everybody sleeps and everybody wakes up”, the music has expanded past romance into one thing nearer to a meditation on how we maintain going.
After which the eerie violin percussions lead again, cyclically, to the place Home started. The loop closes. The home, once more. The lure, intact.
The Verdict
Wuthering Heights will not be a aspect challenge sporting a movie tie-in as cowl. It’s a full file with a thought of structure: the opening Home establishing the jail, the closing Humorous Mouth recognising that love survives the jail anyway, the violin on the finish circling again to the start.
The weaker moments are actual. Just a few tracks really feel slight with out the movie’s visible context, and “Out of Myself” being absent from the ultimate movie minimize is a waste.
However one of the best of it, “At all times In every single place,” “Altars,” “Dying for You,” “Chains of Love,” “Humorous Mouth,” is a number of the most adventurous songwriting she has produced.
Crucially, this file understands Brontë’s emotional gravity extra instinctively than the movie it was written to accompany, not in plot however in suffocation.
The suffocating love, self-destruction as devotion, the home as psychic jail — these issues stay extra truthfully in these twelve tracks than on display screen.
The album doesn’t want the movie to elucidate itself. It’s narratively full by itself phrases.
Charli informed a latest interview she wished to seize “this sense that you just get being on the moors, within the type of bitter chilly.”
The final violin word fades. The home remains to be standing.
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