Charli XCX Storms the Moors of Pop With Wuthering Heights
Charli XCX has a habit of building worlds that demand your passport, your pulse, and occasionally your patience. Her next stop is the wind-lashed cliffside of Wuthering Heights, where a whole new album is arriving on February 13 via Atlantic. The latest single, “Chains of Love”, slips out first, a flashing blade of club goth melodrama that doubles as the album’s welcome mat. Listen to Charli’s new track below.
Charli didn’t stumble onto the Brontë connection; she sprinted toward it. While reading Emerald Fennell’s script for the filmmaker’s upcoming adaptation, she phoned the director for clarity on expectations. Emerald Fennell hinted at a song, and Charli escalated the offer into a whole album. This creative jailbreak thrust her into a persona she describes as raw, wild, sexual, Gothic, British, tortured, and punctuated as if she actually owns a comma.
The life she lived on tour faded for a moment, replaced by an interior storm with better lighting and worse weather. She dove in, a choice that reads like method acting through melody. Her full creative leap is covered in more detail in this feature on her synth-soaked Moors era.
The Elegant Brutal Playbook
Production on Wuthering Heights centers on her partnership with Finn Keane, the artist formerly known as Easyfun. Their early sessions orbited around a line from Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground documentary, where John Cale describes the band’s rule that everything should be elegant and brutal. Keane and Charli took that as a commandment, carrying the phrase across hotel rooms, tour buses, and rented studios with the seriousness of monks transporting relics. Each track became a negotiation between beauty and blunt force, the sonic equivalent of lace gloves over knuckles.
Keane shadowed Charli across tour stops, which gave the album a roving heartbeat. The songs feel unsettled, intentionally so, as if composed in the eye of a storm that kept changing its itinerary.
The Opening Knock at the Door
The 12-track album begins with “House”, her collaboration with John Cale. It functions like the viewer’s entry point into a cinematic universe built on candle smoke, synth haze, and Charli’s signature edge. Cale’s presence signals the lineage, Charli’s delivery signals the departure. She treats the Velvet Underground’s legacy as a palette for invention rather than a velvet rope.
What to Expect From a Torch and Techno Brontë
If Brat played with Hyperpop’s architecture like a kid with a blowtorch, Wuthering Heights arrives with a different kind of voltage. Charli’s voice curls into a terrain of desire and doom, the weather turning at every chorus. This isn’t costume drama with club beats, it is club drama with Victorian voltage, a study in possession and release.
Expect language sharpened to a point, synths that stalk the edges of the frame. Expect Charli in full character, using the Brontë mythos as scaffolding for a story that mutates as she breathes on it.
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