On the front of Wuthering Heights, Charli xcx’s soundtrack for the divisive new Emerald Fennel film, a girlish hand dangles a soldier of toast above a soft-boiled egg, between a man’s roughened, firmly planted hands. It could be a magnified section of a 17th-century Dutch realist painting, but is in fact a still from the film: the hands in question belong to Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
The songs on the album sit at a similarly tasteful remove from the film: so far from Fennel’s brash maximalism, in fact, that Wuthering Heights the album is an independent work of art. Sure, it’s loosely informed by the script: the lyrics contain no modern references, no mentions of clubs or cocaine, just lines like “your name is carved where the wild winds have gone”, the music obsessively tracing an all-consuming love. And as per a soundtrack, the songs sit closely to one another sonically and thematically.
Last November’s lead single ‘House’, featuring John Cale, suggested a radical departure from Charli’s usual deadpan autotune pop. Beginning with a voiceover from Cale that sounds a bit like a corny narrative piped out in a theme park ride or immersive experience, the song builds into a majestic, doomy dirge. But the rest of Wuthering Heights is a pop album, if a gothic one. ‘Dying For You’ and ‘My Reminder’ are immediate hits, while ‘Always Everywhere’ and ‘Chains of Love’ carry the swooping melodrama of a 1980s power ballad. On ‘Eyes of the World’ she coaxes Sky Ferreira, pop’s raspiest and most elusive star, out of hiding.
Most of these songs simmer threateningly, and occasionally boil over, from the Brontean BDSM of ‘Out of Myself’ (“fingers grippin’ the floorboards”, “push my cheek into the stone”) to album closer ‘Funny Mouth’, which submits to a barrage of industrial drums. Charli and producer Finn Keane lived by the Velvet Underground’s sonic rule “elegant and brutal”, and the result is a tussle between tactile orchestration and frigid electronics. Strings saw and soar, and act in place of synths and drum machines, or alongside them – a sound that evokes cold bare rooms, scrubbed wood and dour lighting, in contrast with the heated emotion of the lyrics.
“This world allowed me to escape into something new, immerse myself in a story that was not my own,” said Charli upon the release of Wuthering Heights. That’s not wholly accurate: very little beyond the strings tethers this album to the film, but plenty tethers it to Charli. Using a soundtrack as a smokescreen to distract everybody from the embarrassing task of following up a moment like Brat, is, well, incredibly brat – even if there’s not a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight.
