Label: Atlantic | Released: February 2026 | Rating: 9/10
The cigarettes are gone. The sunglasses are gone. The green is gone. Whatever Charli XCX built in 2024, and she built something genuinely rare, a record whose title became a Collins English Dictionary entry, whose colour palette infiltrated a US presidential campaign, she has walked away from it without looking back.
That self-awareness is part of what makes Wuthering Heights so disarming. She didn’t wait to be dethroned. She burned the set down herself.
What replaced it is stranger and considerably more interesting than anyone expected from a film soundtrack.
What Wuthering Heights Actually Is
When Emerald Fennell approached Charli to write a single for her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, producer Finn Keane and Charli turned the brief into a full companion album.
Twelve tracks. Just over 30 minutes. The guiding slogan, borrowed from John Cale’s stated aim in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground documentary, was “elegant and brutal.”
That phrase was adopted as the record’s mission. It holds.
The result is pop in classical drag. Strings dominate: cello blasts, jagged arrangements, occasional icy baroque passages, but the hooks are Charli’s and the electronics are hers.
This is not a compositional experiment. The novelty sits in the friction between those two impulses: the string arrangements grind against the synths, the drum machines sit awkwardly under orchestral swells, and rather than smoothing those edges, Charli and Keane lean into them.
Finn Keane, largely known from True Romance-era sessions, takes centre stage here in a way no collaborator has since A.G. Cook stepped back.
There’s a craftedness to the sound design that goes beyond utility: the organs on “Out of Myself,” the piano break in “Seeing Things,” the way the strings on “Funny Mouth” open languidly before the drums detonate underneath them.
This is also a sister record to True Romance, her 2013 debut, not just sonically but structurally.
Justin Raisen, who produced and wrote on that album, returned here. She hasn’t reheated anything. She’s returned to a mode she abandoned, approached it from the other side of twelve years, and found it still has things to say.
Track by Track
House (ft. John Cale) opens with ominous orchestral electronics: grating, grand, designed to unsettle.
We reviewed it in depth when it dropped as the lead single, but in album context it hits differently: a declaration of intent rather than a surprise.
John Cale’s spoken-word narration, ancient and craggy against the full-bodied cello blasts, poses questions about beauty and eternity before Charli joins him in “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” The house isn’t a building. It’s a relationship. A trap built from shared origin.
Wall of Sound is where the album finds its emotional centre early. The strings feel beautiful and angelic and yet something dark is still moving underneath them.
A YouTube commenter described it as “brat but it’s horror so it’s not brat, it’s Wuthering Heights,” which accidentally captures the album’s pivot better than most formal criticism has.
Lyrically, the track captures being overwhelmed by an inescapable emotional force: paralysed, unable to act, pleading for someone to break through. The outro is purposefully muffled. The sound has won. She’s been swallowed.
Dying for You comes in swinging and recalls the frenetic energy of “Party 4 U.” It functions as a rave anthem in a Gothic setting, the drums clanging against the strings in exactly the way a rave breakdown shouldn’t work and somehow does.
The lyrical logic is unflinching: every instance of self-destruction, being a gun to the head, a wound in the chest, jewellery worn like a noose, was secretly propelling her toward one person.
By the chorus, the suffering isn’t meaningless. It was preparation. She’s been dying for it all along. She’ll keep dying for it, smiling through the blood loss.
Always Everywhere is the album’s emotional peak, arriving without warning. The delivery, slow and steady, frames a lover who has leaked into every element of the natural world: hillside shadows, rain-soaked echoes, water that reflects two faces becoming one.
Black flowers burn. Violet fades to grey. By the time the chorus arrives, it’s not missing someone. It’s being haunted by them.
The storm they left behind has hardwired itself into her veins, and there’s no surgery for that. One of the best songs she has ever written.
Chains of Love we covered in full here. Vocally it’s the strongest performance on the record.
The way it sweepingly maps the feeling of being bound to a love that is cruel and perverse, finding relief only in the idea of becoming that person’s permanent shadow, makes it a lead single for a reason.
Out of Myself is a deep favourite. The layering of organs, violin and drums produces something unmistakably nostalgic, not in a cheap way, but in the way a specific smell transports you without warning.
Charli explores the ecstatic surrender of losing identity inside a consuming relationship, pain and pleasure becoming indistinguishable.
The imagery is visceral: gripping floorboards, rope between teeth, salt rubbed into wounds. “Who am I? Am I your girl?” hangs unanswered throughout.
By the outro, the mantra-like repetition of “you take me out of myself” has stopped being lament and started being prayer.
Open Up arrives as an interlude and does the work of a full song in half the time. It feels endless in the best possible way, a breath held between chapters.
Seeing Things pivots to something more accessible, girly pop on the surface, the piano section doing quiet structural work underneath, while the lyrical framework stays grief-saturated.
Phantom sightings at winter crossroads. A man in a window who dissolves on approach.
Each recognition that it was just a stranger lands like a small death. The outro’s repetition of “to find you” transforms from confession to incantation.
Altars is the record’s darkest emotional turn. If “Born to Die” and BRAT had a child it would sound something like this.
Religious imagery frames devotion turned toxic: kneeling, crying, searching for proof at a silent altar.
The chorus inverts the familiar adage with devastating clarity: “One is not the loneliest number” becomes a declaration of independence, a refusal to keep burning at someone else’s shrine.
The outro’s “I must only be one” lands not as resignation but as survival. The sound of someone dismantling their own worship and walking out.
Eyes of the World (ft. Sky Ferreira) carries the album’s most significant collaboration. Ferreira’s gritty alt-pop vocals have been absent from music long enough that her appearance here carries real weight.
The chemistry she showed with Charli on “Cross You Out” from how i’m feeling now is back, but in a darker register.
The production, a heavy brittle synth arrangement that reads both ancient and futuristic, creates space for two perspectives of a divided soul.
The biblical imagery is unflinching: flesh upon the cross, projections planted in the mind. Being perceived as crucifixion.
The vocal switch between verse one (Charli front, Sky backup) and verse two (reversed) is a structural decision that earns its keep. Thematically it nods back to “I Blame Myself”: the dread of being seen too clearly by someone who won’t look away.
My Reminder has been widely misread as a romantic track. It’s about a sibling. Someone who knew you before you became yourself and will always measure you against that original version.
The interspersed jarring cinematic strings give it an idiosyncratic texture that lifts it above the breakup-song register most listeners assign it. “I’ll never prove you wrong” isn’t romantic defeat.
It’s the quiet tragedy of blood-bound perception: you are who you were in those four walls, and no amount of distance changes the way they see you. “We’re just different now” does more damage than anything louder on the record.
Funny Mouth closes everything. It begins languidly, barely moving, before the drums arrive and detonate against the strings.
“Unfunny words from your funny mouth” captures the specific ache of being wounded by someone you love saying something careless.
“Are you man enough to compromise?” asks the harder question. The philosophy of the chorus is gentle and earned: don’t let the light go out. Take the missteps. Trust “we’ll be alright.”
By the outro, “everyone sleeps and everyone wakes up”, the song has expanded beyond romance into something closer to a meditation on how we keep going.
And then the eerie violin percussions lead back, cyclically, to where House began. The loop closes. The house, again. The trap, intact.
The Verdict
Wuthering Heights is not a side project wearing a film tie-in as cover. It is a complete record with a considered architecture: the opening House establishing the prison, the closing Funny Mouth recognising that love survives the prison anyway, the violin at the end circling back to the beginning.
The weaker moments are real. A few tracks feel slight without the film’s visual context, and “Out of Myself” being absent from the final film cut is a waste.
But the best of it, “Always Everywhere,” “Altars,” “Dying for You,” “Chains of Love,” “Funny Mouth,” is some of the most adventurous songwriting she has produced.
Crucially, this record understands Brontë’s emotional gravity more instinctively than the film it was written to accompany, not in plot but in suffocation.
The suffocating love, self-destruction as devotion, the house as psychic prison — those things live more honestly in these twelve tracks than on screen.
The album doesn’t need the film to explain itself. It is narratively complete on its own terms.
Charli told a recent interview she wanted to capture “this feeling that you get being on the moors, in the sort of bitter cold.”
The last violin note fades. The house is still standing.
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