Charli XCX’s soundtrack is the only good thing about Wuthering Heights

Stream it today, and don’t see the film

Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

I always wonder what happens to the relationships built on set when a film or play is critically panned. Do actors rush to console a director and double down on their shared creative intention – or do they flee the scene of the crime? What happens if, having filmed something scene by scene for months, placing their trust in the visionary auteur, they hate the Final Cut? Do they say so? Margot Robbie produced Wuthering Heights, so we can assume she had a lot to do with, say, the scene where she lies dead as Cathy, leeches on her face and several gallons of blood pumping from her womb in an elegant and stylish tableau of miscarriage. When Charli XCX attached herself to Emerald Fennell’s film project it was, in theory, a great career move: it said, I am a soundtrack artist now. But Wuthering Heights is no classic, and Charli’s accompanying music should be approached alone, as a concept album, with Fennell’s imagery erased from the mind.

Ten years ago, I watched Charli XCX step into a booth in a west London recording studio to autotune her voice. “Sorry,” she said, in her polite and deadpan way. “You’ll only hear my actual voice out there, which sounds crazy, so I’ll apologise for that in advance.” I had never seen someone sing entire phrases into a machine to get them digitally altered into a coherent melody: it seemed extreme. She was not famous at that point – she had already been plugging away for some years between London and LA, living out of a suitcase, and she seemed tired and rather lonely. But the booth was my first real sense of what would, at that time, have been called the “hyper-pop” attitude: she was not pretending to be authentic in the traditional sense – rather she was manufacturing herself so transparently, and with such balls, as to create a new kind of popstar. In the summer of 2024, sixteen years after she started, she became a megastar. By the time she played Glastonbury last year – a tiny figure in black like an exclamation mark on a too-big stage – I thought, okay, where does this go now?

The Wuthering Heights album is not a “soundtrack”. Charli did not arrange the chamber orchestra that underpins the action on Fennell’s screen, punctuating the moor scenes with bow stabs as sharp as granite, and orchestral drones as relentless as the water cannon that rains down on Heathcliff’s head. The composer Anthony Willis and arranger Gareth Murphy are responsible for that signature sound. Her voice only appears a few times in the actual film. First, on the creepy first single “House”, which features a poem from the Velvet Underground’s John Cale (“can I speak to you privately for a moment!”) over insane levels of industrial feedback. Then, she is heard again in the two-minute “Wall of Sound” (“unbelievable tension!”), where she delivers an emotive tune over a crescendo that turns, eventually, into a George Martin-style string nervous breakdown. “Chains of Love” is the best thing about Wuthering Heights – and I don’t mean the album, I mean the whole project: a banger with the ghost of N-Trance, and much more emotion than Margot Robbie can register in her face. The film employs the kind of punky anachronisms that were fun and sexy 20 years ago in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. But the musical anachronisms – Charli’s commitment to her own distorted club world, among the rocks and the heather – seem like art somehow.

There were no review copies of the album available, even though the film has had plenty of press screenings, and I wondered if Charli’s people were already trying to keep the projects separate. So what of the new songs, only released today (13 February)? “Always Everywhere” is clear and beautiful: she is good at the kind of tender tunes you get from Scandinavian popstars like Robyn, tunes that are sad and human: “I feel like home / still you pull away”. Fennell said that with her film, she was trying to recapture the emotions she felt reading Wuthering Heights for the first time as a fourteen year-old. But there is no tenderness on screen. It is as though XCX and Fennell agreed on the approach for their project, went away, and came back with totally different results.

“Seeing Things” takes the action off the moorsand into a modern city, exploring the limerence phenomenon of seeing an ex on the street wherever you look, because they still have residence in your mind. The science of infatuation is broadly understood now, all over the internet – as are the impulses behind sado-masochism. XCX captures the latter on “Out Of Myself”, where she talks about gripping the floorboards, pushing her cheeks into stone, over a classy avant-garde string section. The words evoke some of Fennell’s sex scenes, but offer something more interior, more quiet, than the bang-bang BDSM in the film.

Wuthering Heights, the album, feels like another step towards sincerity for XCX, albeit through the lens of someone else’s love story – and sincerity is something she struggles with, because it was not part of her original pop creation. The most haunting music in Fennell’s film is a late eighteenth-century folk song, “the Dark Eyed Sailor”, about lovers tortured by years of separation: it is a rare moment of cultural harmony. I don’t know, is it too much to ask that Charli could have sung it? What does it say that she didn’t? It is performed by Olivia Chaney, a folk singer – and don’t go streaming the album to hear it because it’s not on there!

When XCX announced her collaboration with John Cale last year, she used his description of the Velvet Underground’s music – “elegant and brutal” – to describe her planned approach. Those words could now be criticisms of Fennell’s film. Although it is one of the more psychological adaptations – about childhood abuse leading to co-dependency – it wastes its observations, and uses violence as an attempt to titillate. It is a cosplay performance of trauma, corny as Fifty Shades. But the album has emotional complexity, and most importantly it has a heart. Stream it today, and don’t see the film.