Charli XCX – Wuthering Heights Review

In a Substack essay a few months back, Charli XCX laid out her plans for being an artist. It goes beyond one genre or platform, and all the best are doing that. The Brat megastar, who is coming to a close for her party anthem hype and must look for pastures new in the new year, has not reinvented any outlook on multimedia artistry. David Bowie is the master of that, and the likes of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger tried their hand at it, too, during the peak of their performances. Look into the modern-day and you can see both Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane appear in projects they believe in or have some personal feeling towards. Charli XCX has done the opposite with Wuthering Heights, a chance to pad out time between Brat and whatever follows, an inevitable flop is what the Club Classics hitmaker alluded to. Perhaps this is it, a cleanse of those party powerhouse tracks before the next iteration, a new mood for the public to latch onto or reject entirely.  

Charli XCX does not view herself purely as a pop star but is making the moves of one, beat for beat. A soundtrack to an Emerald Fennell film is about as pop-adjacent as you can get, but what separates the Brat mastermind from the rest of the chart-toppers she’s trying to pull away from is her influences. John Cale collaborations and the uncomfortable sensations which feature throughout the Wuthering Heights soundtrack are not quite enough to pull Charli XCX, or the context of the adaptation, through. They feel relatively short-sighted and based on the shock value, which guides Fennell’s other works. They’re opaque imaginings and reimagining of romance and revenge. Charli XCX reflects that on the soundtrack, which is a shame considering this is quite unlike anything she has worked on before. Those slowed tempos, the sinister qualities of a spoken-word Cale opener, provide evidence to her knowledge of artistry, but not the act itself.  

All great soundtracks can extract themselves from the context of the film. Even without seeing Wuthering Heights, you get a feeling Charli XCX is writing for the film, rather than adapting the Emily Bronte classic to the studio independent of Fennell’s vision. Sometimes a bit of a creative clash fuels a stronger fire, and there are moments of this on Wuthering Heights. You can predict where Wuthering Heights is headed, beat for beat. Rising string sections, a few club beats to remind listeners where they may know the name Charli XCX from, and ultimately a collection of songs which hardly scream period piece. Such is the point. Subversion of authorial intent is the way forward for adaptations now, a counter to predictability which has, ironically, become predictable in of itself. For those who did not exhaust themselves on Brat, then Wuthering Heights may have a few sparks of quality.  

For those who did, however, it’ll not be the tonal shift that causes a rupture but the expectation of something more from Charli XCX. It sounds as though she’s trying to take those next steps as an artist with songs like Always Everywhere. But for every test of tepid waters, there’s an equally underwhelming throwback to the Brat style. Out of Myself may as well be a B-side to Brat, not good enough for inclusion but polished up enough to warrant releasing. There’s plenty of solid work to Wuthering Heights, but little of it can be found on Open Up and beyond. A failure to evoke that moodiness, the suggestiveness necessary to an album charting a new course through well-regarded literature. Altars is a hilariously poor piece of work, a real low from Charli XCX. This is not the sound of someone who remodelled the summer listening experience just two years ago. It sounds like soft-tempo slop, tailor-made for faux intimacy. It’s just one major trip up on an otherwise solid, yet forgettable, soundtrack experience.