Charli XCX turned Wuthering Heights into a sonic gothic masterpiece
When the album dropped at the stroke of midnight on February 13, I found myself lying in the dark listening to Charli XCX’s album, Wuthering Heights. As her second soundtrack album (after Bottoms in 2023), this record was made for Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But this collection of songs also stands as a musical adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel in its own right.
The opening track, House, struck me with its ability to succinctly get to the heart of what Wuthering Heights is. It is not just the title of Brontë’s book and Fennell’s film, but also the name of a house, the story’s main setting.
Rather than offering a typical three-act structure of beginning, middle and end, Brontë’s novel is an experimental, strange form. I conceive the novel as structured largely by the movement of the characters between the titular Wuthering Heights and neighbouring property Thrushcross Grange. There is a constant movement, a haunting, between poles rather than a clear linear progression from point A to point B.
I was pleased, therefore, to see that Charli’s part-film soundtrack, part-book adaptation has adopted this impetus towards formal experimentation – albeit in her own distinct way.
Brontë’s story utilises the technique of frame narrative – the layering of several stories within a wider narrative – in a complex web of flashbacks, unreliable narrators and perspective shifts. Charli’s fourth track, Always Everywhere reflects this narrative multiplicity on a sonic level, particularly by evoking the elemental setting of Heathcliff and Cathy’s story.
The grand scale and layers of the sound allow me to visualise and hear the Yorkshire moors. Just as Charli’s lyric “your laughter tearing through the rain” suggests, Always Everywhere has a wide, spatial quality. This song is a vast space through which the wind blows, or where a ghostly voice travels through the sound until it reaches the listener’s ears.
Boundaries of the self
This dispersed, abstracted narrative offered by Brontë and Charli reflect their shared interest in the boundaries of the self. Brontë fans are well-acquainted with Cathy’s famous line: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff.” The album is similarly concerned with interrogating the conception of the self as a sealed entity, instead seeing the individual as spilling out into something other than itself.
In the song Out of Myself, we are attacked by aggressive strings, in a way that feels romantic in the poetic sense. Here, we have the pain and the pleasure of the sublime (an overwhelming aesthetic experience of awe and even terror that writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge wished to capture in their poetry) – a quasi-religious experience. This is why the sado-masochistic imagery in the song’s lyrics – the imperatives to “put the rope between my teeth”, “push my cheek into the stone” and “please rub the salt into my wounds” – offer more than just shock value. The navigation and testing of boundaries contained in these images reflect the novel’s status as a gothic romance.
The central metaphor of the track Chains of Love reflects the ambivalent character of love in the original text. Following Cathy’s declaration that she is Heathcliff, she adds: “He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure […] but as my own being”. The “chains” in Charli’s song act like the star-crossed destiny of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a symbol of an enduring yet tragic partnership – a partnership that the character of Isabella directly mentions in Fennell’s film.
This ambivalence is matched by the use of the strings on the album. In Always Everywhere, the strings represent a cinematic romanticism. In House, Charli uses creepy strings and screams of demonic possession, borrowed directly from the soundscape of horror films. The marriage of strings and electronic sounds represents a similarly complex relationship. At one point in Funny Mouth (specifically, at 1 minute 17), the strings sound like they could be an instrument setting on a keyboard. In My Reminder, choppy vocal effects and intermissions of discordant strings fight for their position on the track.
Sonic melancholia
Charli’s album does not shy from outlining the complexities and, indeed, the problems of Cathy and Heathcliff’s love. The psychoanalytic theorists Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham have explained how the act of mourning can turn into its excessive and neurotic counterpart: melancholia, in which a person “incorporates” or preserves a beloved dead object instead of accepting the reality that the object has gone.
Think of, for example, Heathcliff’s desire to dig up Cathy’s remains on two occasions in the book. Charli’s song Altars reflects the double meaning of Heathcliff’s obsession with Cathy. “Your altar” could be interpreted as a symbol of betrayal; for example, when Cathy stood at the wedding altar with the man she married, Edgar Linton, instead of with her true love, Heathcliff. This phrase could also be interpreted as Heathcliff worshipping at Cathy’s altar even, or perhaps especially, in death. In response to this excessive mourning, Eyes of the World, a feature with Sky Ferreira, offers a plea in its final line: “Set me free”.
Perhaps, then, this is a useful way to navigate what some see as the aberration of adapting English Literary classics into other forms, whether songs or films. Charli XCX’s Wuthering Heights is a reminder that adaptation need not be understood as a detraction of the original novel. To take Charli’s language of nature v nurture in her penultimate track My Reminder, while the album may have emerged from the “same four walls” of Wuthering Heights, it is “different”. This album is not a negation of Brontë’s novel, but a productive, imaginative, beautiful haunting.
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Lillian Hingley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.