“Edgy, somewhat demented, cocaine-fuelled electro glam,” an apt descriptor by Beats Per Minute for the Queen of Hyperpop, Charli xcx. And yet, on her new album “Wuthering Heights,” Charli leaves behind the cigarettes and drugs that characterized the Brat-inspired era in favor of haunting strings and an “elegant and brutal” attitude, a phrase adopted by Charli and her co-producer on the album Finn Keane from Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Underground” documentary.
Despite having only originally been asked for one song by Emerald Fennell, the director of the new “Wuthering Heights,” Charli xcx moves from a rave warehouse to the windy moors of Yorkshire, England, to create a whole accompanying soundtrack. She takes with her the autotune and “nonconformity and audacity” that, according to Raindance, embodies the spirit of her previous album that took hold of the world in the summer of 2024. She speaks plainly of desire, attraction, and absence, leaving her listeners with an idea of a BDSM-y, painfully passionate relationship that spells out danger for the album’s speaker.
In the opening song, played after the Velvet Underground’s founding member John Cale’s Gothically sinister opening monologue, and accompanied by strings that make the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up, Charli xcx’s first words on her seventh studio album are, “I think I’m gonna die in this house,” a mantra repeated seven times after this first instance. The spell-like quality of this, the cragginess in Cale’s voice, and the scream in Charli’s synth-coated throat set up an album that drives an intersection of string instrumentals with modern, experimental pop. This is clearest on the track “Always Everywhere,” where the opening strings reflect the masterful work of Ludovico Einaudi’s 2020 remaster of his neo-classical “Fuori Dal Mondo,” marking a yearning felt deep in the chest.
Einaudi’s song title roughly translates to “out of the world,” calling to Charli’s “Out of Myself,” in which the album’s speaker orders her lover to, “push [her] cheek into the stone.” These lyrics couple up the track with “Dying for You,” where the speaker’s lover is her, “favourite jewellery worn just like a noose,” creating that distinctly kinky feel that one can’t help but associate with the sexual freedom exhibited in her lyrics from songs like “Official,” from her 2019 album “Charli,” as well as with Fennell’s previous projects like the movie “Saltburn.” Though I have not seen her latest film, these lyrics seem to reflect reviews of “Wuthering Heights,” which includes The Guardian’s observation that the main character Cathy is “haughty and horny, beseeching and cruel.”
“Alters” buries itself in percussion and the classic autotune that Charli fans have come to know and love, but without the deep bass and reverb that the album’s second single “Chains of Love” gives us, along with distinctly ‘80s keyboard in tow. Sky Ferreira features on the track, adding powerfully granulated vocals, begging to be set free from the “eyes of the world.” She now joins Troye Sivan, Caroline Polachek, and of course the legends Ariana Grande, Lorde, and A. G. Cook, all of whom have collaborated with Charli xcx in the past.
The track “Funny Mouth” closes this album with a glorious interpolation of synthetic strings. The song asks “are you man enough to / compromise,” building the volume and tension in a distinctly “Lux” fashion, ready to fall into a disintegration of sound that would feel at home in Charli’s 2020 album “how i’m feeling now.” These callbacks to her previous works, and its ability to be independent from the movie that it can accompany, clearly appeal to fans and critics alike. As of Feb. 13, the first single “House” had been streamed 10 million times. The album received an 82 on Metacritic, a rating that I wholeheartedly agree with.
