Fresh off the afterglow of a summer-long pop renaissance, Charli XCX trades club adrenaline for emotional precision on Wuthering Heights.
It was last Christmas when Charli received a text from Emerald Fennell, who had just begun developing a reimagined take on the classic gothic romance. Charli was asked to deliver a singular song for the soundtrack, but was soon captivated by the script’s distinctly English mix of brooding and grit. “When I think of Wuthering Heights I think of many things,” Charli said via Instagram, “I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the Moors, I think of the mud and the cold.” From these musings emerged a full companion album, released on the eve of Valentine’s Day, featuring artists like Sky Ferreira and John Cale.
PHOTO: WUTHERING HEIGHTS 2026
The project’s tone offered a departure from the sweat-slicked, neon maximalism of BRAT, though this new record is no less emotionally exacting or stylish. It finds its footing in the timeless story of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, taking us through an experience as compulsively romantic as the novel that inspired it.
In developing sound, Charli drew inspiration from The Velvet Underground’s 2021 documentary, “One thing that stuck with me was how John Cale described a key sonic requirement of the[band]. That any song had to be both ‘elegant and brutal’. I got really stuck on that phrase.”
That duality quickly became structural. Charli and co-producer Finn Keane centered the record around synths and strings, a perfect blend between refinement and brutality. The synth is best captured in tracks Reminder” and “Eyes of the World featuring Sky Ferreira”, where the sound takes on a spatial quality, recalling the expanse of the moors. Their disembodied persistence echoes the novel’s fixation on memory and haunting; the pulsing patterns of “My Reminder” return like something that insists on being felt again and again.
PHOTO: WUTHERING HEIGHTS 2026
But it’s the strings that truly haunt the record, punctuating the tracks with beats of elegance and angst. The melodies resist anything overly lush or orchestral like BRATS “Everything is Romantic”, instead they move in a darker register. The opening track, “House featuring John Cale” has violinists bowing at the bridge, resulting in a gothic screech that sets the film’s tone.
In the novel, feeling is rarely expressed cleanly or directly; it’s suppressed, misdirected, or deferred until it becomes a burden that lingers past reason. “Always Everywhere” becomes the album’s clearest articulation of this strain, unfurling into a sweeping chorus that remains anchored by Charli’s reliably sharp lyrics.
Still, I hear your laughter tearing through the rain
I can’t escape the storm you gave me
Constant lightning in my veins
Every echo calls your name
With a modern sensibility Wuthering Heights reimagines a tragic Victorian love story, dignifiying yearning as something ancient and inescapable, a force that binds us in time. “I wanted to dive into a persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar.” Charli XCX has always staged hedonism as spectacle, but on Wuthering Heights she slows the pulse and widens the frame, delivering songs that invite both heartbreak and release.