Charli XCX’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Is the Perfect 180

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’s The Moment, 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 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’s soundtrack for the new remake of Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s tale of heartbreak and class warfare, must hitch its wagon to the provocations of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn’s 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’s Wuthering Heights has been celebrated as her “dumbest movie” and dragged as a “bodice-ripping misfire.” 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.

The artist whose last album left us a catchphrase about sniffing coke and the director who needs you to know what a hanged man’s dick does when he dies could have connected over dedicated filth. But the “360” 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 “elegant and brutal” inspired by English “passion and pain” and the music of the Velvet Underground, since she’d recently watched the 2021 Todd Haynes doc about the international gang of protopunk innovators. John Cale, the band’s pivotal viola player, guests on the opener, “House,” 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’s voice, grasp at the same period appropriateness as Jacob Elordi’s very mid-1800s sideburns.

A few tracks after “House” wields its cello like a weapon, an orchestra sweetly buttresses ascending vocals in “Always Everywhere.” Charli’s 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 “elegant and brutal” means in Charli’s pocket of the Wuthering Heights project. It doesn’t refer to sex and death; what’s abrasive are the confrontationally loud reverb levels and swirling string lines that make the vocalist seem submerged in water. “Chains of Love” 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: “I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner!” The jittery chordophone stabs that crowd the singer in “Out of Myself” dramatize a feeling of being ripped from one’s familiar social standing. Charli is trying to capture the tormented affection driving Brontë’s doomed duo of Catherine and Heathcliff, whose romance has been memorialized by everyone from Death Cab for Cutie, whose 2008 Narrow Stairs album honors “Cath …,” to Jim Steinman, who wrote Céline Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” with Brontë in mind.

Charli’s approach is pointedly British, the idea seemingly being that “this is what you might hear if this songwriter could perform in a Victorian music hall.” But the album is just as mindful of the pulse of the past couple of years in pop and movie music, where Rosalía dropped the orchestral wonder Lux and Dijon’s 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’s gorgeous Marty Supreme score. Wuthering Heights luxuriates in a quadrant of Charli’s creativity that isn’t 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’t 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.)

Still, it’s 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’s “Lucky” or Charli’s “Next Level Charli.” 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 “Seeing Things” leaves drums off a shouty composition like her Icona Pop smash “I Love It,” and the thumping, shoegazing Sky Ferreira reunion “Eyes of the World” (unfortunately no relation to the Grateful Dead classic) picks up where their 2019 “Cross You Out” left off, simulating desperation in its languid pacing. “Eyes” and the stomping “My Reminder” feel like callbacks to the mid-tempo synth pop of Charli’s 2013 debut, True Romance; on X, she referred 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.

It’s less crass but no less loud; it’s 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’s Joe Keery on the upbeat, universalist closer, “Funny Mouth.” It may be tempting to call Wuthering Heights Charli’s first power play after an ascension to a higher level of fame, but it’s 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’ tools.