Charli xcx – Wuthering Heights

Charli xcx’s "Wuthering Heights" companion record does something Emerald Fennell can’t: it remembers that Wuthering Heights is a romance of malice and anxiety. The music here is bodily and sharp, its patina well-worn upon arrival.

What’s impressive is how cleanly it runs two logics at once. It tracks the novel’s emotional geometry while allowing xcx’s own mythology to ooze between the joints. Dying for You evokes Crash-era pep, bouncing on Oscar Holter-esque buoyancy. Seeing Things flirts with the obvious ghost of Kate Bush, the melodrama of Shakespeare’s Sister, English-songbird lilt in full-swing.

Justin Raisen’s fingerprints are all over the project, his True Romance fatalism particularly present on Chains of Love, a sonic homecoming for early xcx loyalists. As ever, she cuts to the chase: impatient, hook-forward, allergic to over-explanation especially on the wonderful Out of Myself, itself reminiscent of the glittery haymaker of 2019’s Charli. My Reminder proves the exception to the rule. It’s the spriest, fullest she has sounded, a pop song that has its windows thrown open.

The gothic thesis sticks because frequent collaborator Finn Keane commits to the sonic tendrils that reach through the project. These choices are practical; the lack of a definitive snare in a lot of places, the tracks bobbing on kick or swimming in bass instead, murky and unnerving. Dissonant strings, tense and unromantic, permeate the album to devastating effect; on opener House, in particular, where they swell with corrosive, warped synths as a herald of this album’s bifold trajectory.

So yes, it “accompanies” the film. It’s also the best part of it; a correction: Brontë’s gothica as something that clings and stains. And Charli, thoughtfully and tastefully, suffusing that stain into her continued ascendancy.

Listen to: House, Out of Myself, Seeing Things, My Reminder