Charli xcx has shed the frenetic fluorescence of BRAT to inhabit the windswept, shadowed world of Wuthering Heights, co-produced by longtime collaborator Finnn Keane. Released alongside Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel on Friday, February 13th, the album shines as a standalone statement, bulldozing the high-voltage, hook-driven architecture of BRAT and its remix album to make way for wintery edifices that dwell in atmosphere, darkness, and psychological tension – all while retaining Charli’s idiosyncratic imprints. It seems that Wuthering Heights has emerged partly as a counterpoint to the intensity of the BRAT cycle. Following an extended period of touring and promotion, she has spoken about creative exhaustion and the need for a new stimulus. In a November 2025 Substack post, Charli described the project as a “dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar.”
Despite early speculation about a dramatic aesthetic reinvention, the album is a refracted continuation of earlier phases in her catalogue. Charli framed this project as a sister album to her debut True Romance, echoes of which surface in its moodier, gothic, and avant pop aesthetics. However, there is a more industrial and brutal corrosion that warps these sensibilities into something more mythological; a perfect score to a tale of a turbulent relationship that reverberates across time and space. As a soundtrack, the record is inherently tied to cinematic function. Charli herself has suggested that part of the appeal lay in working within another creator’s world, embracing constraint rather than complete artistic autonomy.
Last November, Charli XCX introduced this tonal shift with ‘House’, the lead single and opening track of Wuthering Heights. It arrived steeped in gothic tension, with an atmosphere evoking a claustrophobic, crumbling coastal mansion as jagged, atonal strings and ghostly spoken words from The Velvet Underground’s John Cale drift across the length of the track. Charli’s caustic vocals materialize with towering brass, doubling up on a refrain with John Cale before taking on a life of their own, moving between restraint and rupture.
‘Wall of Sound’ layers massive strings that almost engulf Charli’s soaring vocals, while ‘Dying for You’ contrasts danceable avant-pop pulses with lyrics steeped in dark longing and torment. ‘Always Everywhere’ carries a hymnal, bridal-gothic vastness, and ‘Chains of Love’ illustrates love as constriction and release, with muted percussion erupting into grandiose, cinematic pop passages. Charli’s voice dominates on the carnal ‘Out of Myself’ and unrestrained ‘Altars’, oscillating between fragility and intensity with masterfully-produced delicacy. ‘Eyes of the World’, featuring former collaborator Sky Ferreira, is ghostly and icy, anchored by detached vocal interplay, while ‘Funny Mouth’, co-written with Joe Keery, closes the album in spectral unease.
While the album’s lyricism, literal and minimalist, retains its cohesive undercurrents of obsession and destruction, the album leans into sonic contrast. Orchestral elements intersect with fractured electronics, with percussion often dissolving into ambience rather than driving momentum. Silence is used with unusual confidence for a pop (or rather, pop-adjacent) release, creating negative space that heightens emotional tension. Certain tracks achieve striking impact through layering rough strings and dissonant textures, while others lean toward more conventional pop frameworks, divisive in impact. Some may argue that the pop moments compromise the intended gothic weight – however, it is the view of this writer that weaving together these sonic threads offers an experience that is multifaceted and equally immersive, leading the listener into a world that is formidably unsettling, yet beautiful and accessible.
Measured and potent, Wuthering Heights rejects the impossible task of attempting to deliver an album anything like BRAT following its zeitgeist-defining surge. Instead, Charli xcx has opted to paint with a deliberately dark palette – and emerged with a luminous, haunting triumph of self-assured artistic versatility.
