Doing a soundtrack is a nimble way of dodging the risks that come with trying to follow a generational hit like ‘Brat’. Rather than attempt to outdo a cultural detonation, Charli XCX sidesteps it — trading strobe-lit arenas for windswept moors on ‘Wuthering Heights’, her companion album to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation. It’s a lateral move, but one that, for the most part, pays off.
The John Cale-featuring House sets the tone: craggy spoken-word, funereal strings, and a sense of gothic theatre that feels intentionally austere. The project is billed as “elegant and brutal”, and when the cellos surge beneath Charli’s half-shrieked hook, you believe it. There’s ambition here — not reinvention exactly, but a deliberate mood shift.
Always Everywhere is more revealing. Built on a simple romantic fixation, it’s one of the few moments where the writing cuts deeper than the aesthetic.
The strings don’t just decorate; they press against the melody, giving the track a bruised tenderness that suggests Charli stretching towards something beyond instinctive hookcraft.
Elsewhere, the record slips back into safer territory. Out of Myself gestures toward Brontëan obsession — floorboards, stone, physical submission — but musically it feels like a ‘Brat’ B-side dressed in a corset.
The friction between orchestration and pop muscle never quite combusts (Eleanor Rigby it ain’t). And while Funny Mouth closes things with industrial thud and icy drama, it’s more striking in texture than in emotional impact.
Soundtracks as standalone albums are rarely classics, and that’s sort of the point. ‘Wuthering Heights’ has a recurring tension: vivid atmosphere, patchy depth. The strings are consistently lush; the ideas less so. Charli’s directness — usually her superpower — occasionally leaves these gothic tableaux feeling sketched rather than inhabited. You sense experimentation, but also a bit of calculation.
Still, as a bit of a creative reset, it works. ‘Wuthering Heights’ isn’t the seismic next chapter after ‘Brat’, but it isn’t trying to be. It’s a controlled swerve, a palate cleanser with genuine craft. It’s intriguing, intermittently powerful, but rarely transcendent. It might also represent one too many creative geniuses on a hot mess of a Brontë adaptation…but that’s a whole other conversation.
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