By MARIA SHERMAN
Charli xcx’s soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is a brooding collection approximating some image of gothic romanticism.
Its enjoyable if not revelatory 12 tracks are a collaboration with songwriters and producers Finn Keane and Justin Raisen, and her first full-length album since the zeitgeist-shaping “Brat.”
It is not the role of every film soundtrack to function as a standalone album, though Charli has said that was her ambition here. In the midst of her “Brat” summer two years ago, she worked on “Wuthering Heights,” delighted to detour into different territory.
But how different is it in ethos? There’s a shared spirit of deep devotion and infatuation, surely, in both “Brat” and Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” and a shared sexuality in Charli and Fennell’s art — people wear corsets to nightclubs these days. Instrumentation might be the biggest distinction; here, Charli uses strings arrangements for the first time, often for propulsion, like on the anxious “Seeing Things.”
The rave work might have been put to the side, but Charli’s signatures remain throughout: auto-tuned vocals, unexpected production, shackled and resonant pop hooks.
They are everywhere on “Wuthering Heights,” from the previously released singles like “Wall of Sound” — no Phil Spector here — and the spacey ballad “Chains of Love,” with its echoes of Taylor Swift, to the electro-pop “My Reminder” and an underutilized Sky Ferreira on “Eyes of the World.” The last is their first collaboration since 2019’s “Cross You Out” and samples English rock band Wolf Alice’s “Don’t Delete the Kisses.”
It’s likely that Charli has a great industrial record in her, evidenced by the first song released for the soundtrack and its undisputed best: “House,” featuring the great experimentalist John Cale. (It’s no wonder it works so well: Charli is an undisputed Velvet Underground superfan. The band’s high art, pop fame is a central theme in her vision, as is their ability to combine the “elegant and brutal” — a favorite quote of hers that is actually a quote of his.) Cale recites a poem in his weathered Welsh tone atop cello and metallic sounds, building into its booming final minute. “I think I’m gonna die in this house,” he and Charli harmonize. It builds in distortion from there, the album’s only true moment of gothic seduction, before Cale brings it to a spoken word coda. “In every room,” he says, “I hear silence.”
In whole, “Wuthering Heights” does function as an album as much as it does a soundtrack — but that’s mostly the benefit of having a single artist realize their single vision, a privilege rarely afforded. Charli xcx does not waste it here.
“Wuthering Heights” by Charli xcx
Three stars out of five.
On repeat: “House,” “Chains of Love,” “Funny Mouth”
Skip it: “Altars,” “Seeing Things,” “Open Up”
For fans of: Charli xcx’s “True Romance,” yearning in the internet sense, vinyl clothing