Charli XCX has always thrived in contradictions, but “Chains of Love” finds her exploring darker, more visceral emotional territory than ever before.
Released as the second single from her forthcoming Wuthering Heights soundtrack album (dropping February 13, 2026, just ahead of Emerald Fennel’s film adaptation), this track marks a sharp departure from the chaos-driven hyperpop that defined BRAT.
Instead, it embraces a haunting, melancholic aesthetic that feels both timely and inevitable.
The track opens with Charli speak-singing a series of masochistic declarations: “I’d rather lay down in thorns/I’d rather drown in a stream/I’d rather light myself on fire.”
These aren’t idle metaphors. They’re the desperate calculations of someone trapped in an all-consuming relationship.
The imagery is brutal, physical, and uncomfortably vivid, capturing the self-destructive impulse that love can trigger when it becomes obsession.
The line “I’d rather watch my skin bleed/In the eye of your storm” crystallizes this theme perfectly, positioning the narrator as someone who would rather endure physical pain than emotional abandonment.
Producer Finn Keane (who previously crafted BRAT highlights like “Von Dutch” and “Sympathy Is a Knife”) strips away the maximalist production Charli is known for, replacing it with orchestral arrangements that feel sweeping yet suffocating.
The strings add weight and drama, while Charli’s vocal delivery remains measured and controlled, creating tension between the rawness of the lyrics and the restraint in her performance.
The chorus hits hardest: “My face is turning blue/Can’t breathe without you here/The chains of love are cruel/I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner.”
Here, Charli articulates the central paradox of toxic attachment: the recognition that this relationship is destructive, yet the inability to break free from it.
The metaphor of chains is direct but effective, capturing both the bondage and the permanence she feels.
The repetition of “I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner” suggests self-awareness without agency, a common experience for those caught in patterns they know are harmful but can’t escape.
The refrain (“I know the chains of love won’t break”) functions as both resignation and acceptance. There’s no hope for freedom here, no promise of future liberation.
Charli presents love not as something that heals or fulfills, but as an inescapable force that damages and transforms.
This aligns perfectly with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship is less about romance and more about obsession, revenge, and the ways love can warp people beyond recognition.
What makes “Chains of Love” particularly striking is how it functions as a sonic buffer between BRAT and whatever comes next.
The soundtrack framing allows Charli to experiment without the weight of expectation that would accompany a standard follow-up album.
She’s exploring new textures and moods without abandoning her core identity as a pop provocateur. The orchestral elements and gothic atmosphere demonstrate her range while maintaining the emotional honesty that has always defined her strongest work.
Charli has proven time and again that her melancholic material often surpasses her more chaotic output. Tracks like “Track 10” and “Visions” showcase her ability to channel vulnerability into something both beautiful and unsettling.
“Chains of Love” belongs in this lineage. It’s a song that lingers, that makes you sit with discomfort rather than offering easy catharsis.
The bridge strips things back to wordless vocalisations (“Oh, oh, oh, oh”), a moment where language fails and only raw emotion remains.
It’s a brief respite before the outro returns to that haunting refrain, driving home the inevitability of being trapped in this cycle.
The Music Video: Giving Gothic Romance a Physical Form
Arriving on 17 November 2024, Charli XCX’s music video transforms the track’s emotional turmoil into a visceral, paranormal spectacle.
Directed by C Prinz, the monochromatic visual traps Charli, clad in a stark white dress and boots, on a massive dining table in an empty, palatial hall.
This minimalist aesthetic is not just a style choice but a narrative device, stripping away all distraction to focus on her raw, physical performance.
As the song builds, an unseen force attacks. Plates and cutlery fly at her face as she writhes and dances, thrown around by invisible hands.
This is not just a ghost story; it is the perfect visual metaphor for a love that controls and destroys you, an external force you cannot see or name.
The most striking image comes when the table tips vertical, leaving Charli suspended in air, clinging for survival. It is a literal representation of the lyric “I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner.”
The video’s climax is cathartic but pointedly not redemptive. Charli stomps the glass table into a storm of shards, but this destruction does not break her chains; it just makes the damage visible. C Prinz’s direction is key here, leaning into gothic horror with restraint.
The violence is implied, the horror psychological. Charli looks genuinely pained and exhausted, with no glamour to soften the suffering.
This is not a romanticised tragedy but a brutal, relentless portrait of a trap, and one of Charli’s most fully realised artistic statements to date.
The Beauty of Being Bound
“Chains of Love” doesn’t romanticise the very thing it’s named after, instead Charli presents love as something dirty, dark, and tinged with nostalgia: beautiful in its intensity but dangerous in its permanence.
The song captures the frustration of wanting escape while simultaneously craving imprisonment, of recognising toxicity while being unable to resist it.
This isn’t a song about heartbreak. It’s about the moment before heartbreak, when you’re still tethered to something you know will destroy you.
It’s gothic pop at its finest: twisted, profound, and uncomfortably honest. As Charli continues building towards the full Wuthering Heights project, “Chains of Love” establishes her ability to inhabit the supernatural and tormented world of Brontë’s novel while making it feel startlingly contemporary.
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