CHARLI XCX: Wuthering Heights (Atlantic)
VERDICT: Great album - but totally different to Brat!
FOUR STARS
Tapping into the electronic dance music of the 1990s and 2000s, Charli XCX used her 2024 album Brat to showcase the hedonistic, party-loving side of her personality.
That BRIT-winning record's lime green artwork became a viral sensation, and its infectious songs provided the musical backdrop to a 'Brat summer'.
Now, with her soundtrack to Emerald Fennell's big screen reimagining of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, the singer born Charlotte Emma Aitchison is set to bring us her goth spring.
As Britain's most adventurous mainstream music star, she regularly treads a fine line between catchy pop and more esoteric fare - and both strands are evident here.
Having declared the Brat summer well and truly over, Charli is pivoting to the silver screen. Alongside Wuthering Heights, she stars in forthcoming documentary The Moment, a satirical portrait of fame, and has cameos in a string of other independent movies.
When Fennell approached her to compose one song for her latest film, she responded with an entire album.
With her esoteric Wuthering Heights soundtrack, Charli XCX is set to bring us her goth spring
When director Emerald Fennell approached her to compose one song for her latest film, she responded with an entire album (pictured: the album artwork)
Made with regular collaborator Finn Keane - and with guest spots by The Velvet Underground's John Cale and American pop star Sky Ferreira - Charli's take on Wuthering Heights stands in stark contrast to Brat.
The Cambridge-born singer has likened it to the 1980s-style electronics of her 2013 debut album True Romance, but that's true only in fleeting moments.
The two opening tracks achieve the presumed aim of evoking dark happenings on the wild and windswept Yorkshire moors. House, which features the weather-beaten, spoken-word voice of 83-year-old Cale, ends with Charli intoning, 'I think I'm gonna die in this house.' Wall Of Sound leans further into her more experimental instincts.
'Your name is carved where the wild winds have gone,' she sings on Always Everywhere, as chamber strings and atmospheric synths clash to emphasise a mood of doomed romance, while Sky Ferreira (who previously worked with Charli on her 2019 single Cross You Out) is a ghostly presence on sombre ballad Eyes Of The World.
It would have been easy for Charli to treat this soundtrack as an art-house project, but she's smart enough to avoid falling into that trap, and there are tracks - Dying For You, Chains Of Love, the breezy My Reminder - that hark back to the singer's early pop releases, even if the lyrics are darker: 'All the pain and torture that I went through all makes sense to me now,' she tells us on Dying For You.
Inspired by the love story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, played by Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the film, Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights is an excellent soundtrack, one that'll surely be in the reckoning when next year's awards season comes around.
But it also works well as a stand-alone album - totally different to Brat, but a worthy successor.