The first time I heard Wuthering Heights I felt a bit like I’d walked into the wrong room – one lit by firelight rather than LEDs. Is this the sound of an artist in retreat? Away from the dancefloor, from self-scrutiny, from the lime-green glare of her hyperpop Brat era? Or a clean break from the terms that used to define her?
When film maker Emerald Fennell asked for one song last year, Charli was on the brink of burnout. But the more she got into the creative world of Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights adaptation, the more she realised how much she wanted to escape into someone else’s 177-year-old-story.
The result isn’t a soundtrack exactly – there is a full score for the newly released bodice-ripper – it’s more of a companion album that gave Charli the space for unexpected avante garde expressionism.
The album opens with a poem by John Cale of the Velvet Underground set to distorted strings and blackboard scratching vocals by Charli that’s certainly more to do with the thematic concepts of Emily Bronte’s novel than a self-spawned body of work.
The advance-released "Chains of Love" speak to Catherine's masochistic devotion – "I'd rather lay down in thorns, I'd rather drown in a stream" and introduce orchestral swells that run throughout. Obsessive, destructive love, perfection and imprisonment are ever present – in the lyrics of “Dying For You” (“you're my favourite jewellery, worn just like a noose 'round my neck”); or the softly devastating “Altars” with the refrain “One is not the loneliest number, Won’t keep putting all my faith in you.” All of these tracks could work as standalone pop, but there are a few here that feel incomplete without Margot Robbie's heaving bosom to anchor them.
“Wall of Sound” and “Open Up” build as sustained pressure rather than release, with hooks that loop until they feel physical but don’t necessarily resolve. It's film score logic. They provide texture and atmosphere but without the film’s visuals, feel incomplete – beautiful fragments rather than finished statements.
The Sky Ferreira duet "Eyes of the World" offers the album's most hypnotic moment – two voices circling each other like Brontë's doomed lovers, Ferreira's smoky delivery adding weight to Charli’s dissolving echo.
Even when the songs blur together into something like Gothic wallpaper, I found myself admiring the nerve of it – how completely she’s willing to step out of her own reflection. With eight films in production and her own production company Studio365, it’s a clever transition of someone deliberately dismantling their previous identity to see what else might be possible.
