CHARLI XCX - Wuthering Heights

Let's start the way one shouldn't, with a clarification. This won't be about Emerald Fennell's film, the umpteenth cinematic adaptation of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" - Davide Spinelli's review for OndaCinema does that job perfectly. Nor will there be much discussion of how the film's soundtrack, penned by a Charli XCX in creative recovery after the enormous wave of Brat-summer and its ensuing mainstream breakthrough, fits into the plot and works alongside the imagery. The clarification is necessary, though, given a score that does reflect the on-screen events but also knows how to break away from them, radiating a light all its own. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a darkness all its own: closer to the gloomy moods that marked her earliest mixtapes, albeit adapted to a cinematic context, Aitchison delivers one of the most genuinely pop collections in her already dense catalogue, rediscovering a thread of songwriting rarely this melodic. The post-"Brat" era couldn't have asked for a more fitting showcase.

Nothing better than something that upends the expectations placed on the follow-up to the breakout record of Aitchison's career, helping to decompress and shed any undue expectations. Right from "House", the opening track written and performed together with the legendary John Cale, we're in entirely different territory, made of string streaks and drones, sustained build-ups and unexpected explosions, dark spaces and half-lit faces, as if the ghosts of the Earnshaw family had returned to haunt the rooms they once walked. It's an immersive mood that the artist explores with great variety of means, exploiting the sonic palette with all due determination: she does it with the off-beat rhythms of "Wall Of Sound", designed to enhance a structure suspended between release and damnation, and emphasizes it with the synthetic manipulation of "Dying For You", a track that harks back to the days of "True Romance" and "Sucker", flipping their youthful effervescence into a necessarily more mature and painful perspective.

Pain and passion, all-consuming and destructive feelings, find here the narrative vehicle that is almost entirely absent from Fennell's adaptation. Thanks also to a vocal delivery stripped of excess filters to better expose its own vulnerability, the soundtrack unleashes moments of real tension, both in its more direct, impactful passages ("Chains Of Love" being the clearest example) and in its mood swings (the nervous vibrations of "Out Of Myself"), marking the key turning points of a story that, notwithstanding the novel's eternal fame, here manages to live even without visual support.

Probably a problem for the film, much less so for a collection that doesn't need a glossy aesthetic to leave its mark. Sure, a Swift-esque moment (yes, really) like "Seeing Things" ends up crushed under the weight of its arrangement, too bombastic to support a far more delicate lyrical episode, but it's an exception - a parenthesis quickly forgotten thanks to the dark-pop shades of "Eyes Of The World" (featuring Sky Ferreira, here a spectral presence), and above all the grandiose scope of "Funny Mouth" (structured perfectly as a two-part grand finale).

Did we need yet another retelling of "Wuthering Heights"? The answer is already built into the question; it's good to note that at least one part of the whole operation is worth remembering.

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09/03/2026