Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album reviews

As if we weren't drowning in reviews of the film already, Charli XCX's Wuthering Heights album is also getting some.

From The Guardian, which gives it 4 stars out of 5.

Its musical aesthetic – and indeed Cale’s influence – weaves around the other songs here. Ominous drones regularly undercut the songs, as on Wall of Sound or Eyes of the World, the latter a standout collaboration with American singer Sky Ferreira. Strings dominate the sound, creating a sense of friction with the synths and drum machines. They frequently sound jagged and disruptive – Dying for You marries the dynamics of a rave breakdown to occasionally atonal strings; even the Europoppy melody of My Reminder is suddenly dislocated by a discordant flurry. When they aren’t, as on the staccato Seeing Things, it doesn’t feel too much of a stretch to suggest they carry a hint of Cale’s icy baroque pop masterpiece Paris 1919 about them. Elsewhere, on closer Funny Mouth, the kind of industrial metal drums found on House make a reappearance.

Atonal, disruptive, industrial: despite all this, Wuthering Heights isn’t an album likely to alienate Charli’s existing fanbase, who in fairness have already reacted to House’s aural challenges by streaming it 10m times and meme-ing the living daylights out of its horror movie-worthy chorus. The songwriting is uniformly fantastic – she clearly doesn’t view pushing at the boundaries of what she does as any reason to abandon her pop smarts – and furthermore, it works as an album completely independent from the film it’s intended to accompany.

There’s a narrative arc to the songs that doesn’t require a working knowledge of the Wuthering Heights plot: you could simply read them as documenting the rise, fall and emotional fallout from a faintly toxic-sounding, BDSM-y relationship – “push my face into the stone … put the rope between my teeth … please rub the salt in my wounds,” she sings on Out of Myself – that might just as easily be taking place in present-day Basingstoke as on the windswept hills of 19th-century West Riding.

One thing Wuthering Heights really has in common with Brat is a sense of bold self-assurance. You could, if you wished, describe its contents as experimental (they certainly are by today’s pop standards, which don’t tend to go so big on disruptive atonality or monologues by octogenarian art-rock legends) but there’s nothing tentative about them. Moreoever, its confidence never feels misplaced. “My name’s on the cover, but is it a Charli xcx album?” wrote its author in a lengthy Substack post. “I don’t know, nor do I care to find out.” It definitely is: Wuthering Heights feels substantially more than a side-hustle, or a footnote. (Alexis Petridis)

According to The New Statesman, 'Charli XCX’s soundtrack is the only good thing about Wuthering Heights'.

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 moors and 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. (Kate Mossman)

'The best Brontë songs since Kate Bush' for The Times, which gives it 4 out of 5 stars.

That’s quite the opening statement and if what follows is more conventionally Charli, it’s still satisfyingly punchy. Dying for You has the staccato urgency of the Killers’ Mr Brightside and lyrics (“I’m losing gallons of blood/ the river’s turning to red/ I got a smile on my face”) that could have been written by Fennell, while the spectral ballad Altars turns Harry Nilsson’s One (“one is the loneliest number”) on its head by proclaiming “one is not the loneliest number”. More world-class wallowing, which is kind of the point of Wuthering Heights.

• Wuthering Heights review — Margot Robbie is a Brontë Barbie

Like the film, the album tails off a bit towards the end before rousing itself. Eyes of the World, a duet with the American pop star Sky Ferreira, is overblown and underwhelming, but Funny Mouth provides an appropriately tragic electro-goth finale. Written with Finn Keane, who co-produced the album, and Joe Keery, the singer-actor who played Steve in Stranger Things, it combines rainswept strings, stuttering electronics and Twin Peaks synths with some gorgeously defiant vocals from Aitchison. “Are you man enough to compromise?” she sings. A challenge to the obstinate Heathcliff? One thing’s for sure, Aitchison, like Fennell, is compromising for nobody. (Ed Potton)

Even The Independent gives it 5 stars out of 5.

Charli scored a coup by coaxing former Velvet, John Cale, to appear on the tremendous single “House”. Like Nellie Dean, the elderly housekeeper who unreliably narrates most of Emily Brontë’s novel, the 82-year-old Cale’s weathered vocal adds a sense of deeper time (Brontë was always reaching back – her mid-19th century novel was set in the late 18th century), along with a reminder that passion and creativity doesn’t necessarily fade with age. Over the ragged, repeated snag of a violin bow, Cale speaks with haunting formality: “Can I speak to you privately for a moment?/ I just want to explain/ Explain the circumstances I find myself in/ What and who I really am/ I’m a prisoner, to live for eternity…” Towards the close, Charli balances his measured tone with a long, corrosive howl.

That howl echoes through the album, even as Charli switches to a low, guttural mutter on songs such as “Wall of Sound”. Here, she invokes “unbelievable tension... unbelievable pressure” that builds over loops of thwarted yearning; it escalates to a clubbable pace on “Dying for You” with its breathless revelations, “All the pain and torture that I went through all makes sense to me now/ I was dying for you.” The wild beauty of the misty moors gleams through “Always Everywhere” with a melody that scales the hills, while “Seeing Things” deals in madness and visions over punchy, sawing violins. The spectacular “Chains of Love” writhes around in the anguish of obsessive love: “I’d rather lay down in thorns/ I’d rather drown in a stream/ I’d rather light myself on fire/ I’d rather wear all these scars/ I’d rather watch my skin bleed…”

The whole thing is a phantasmagorical fever dream that relishes its weird and experimental noises without sacrificing cool hooks or accessible language. Charli proves herself much more in tune with the terrible complexity of Brontë’s original vision than Fennell: there are no inverted commas around the emotion expressed on this record. A windswept, gothic triumph. (Helen Brown)

Also 5 out of 5 stars from The Irish Times:

A mood board rather than a conventional album, the record morphs into a jagged power ballad on Wall of Sound, where Charli’s vocals crack with emotion against a stark swirl of strings. Art pop gives way to disco abandon on the pounding Dying for You, which begins as a pastiche of the Buggles hit Video Killed the Radio Star and then swerves into a fearless foray into weepy hauteur on the dance floor.

That Charli doesn’t quite know how to respond to the fame she long sought and finally achieved with Brat is underscored by the mockumentary film she is releasing in parallel with Wuthering Heights. Charli is a good actress – she more than acquitted herself hosting Saturday Night Live in 2024 – but the consensus is that, with The Moment, she seems unsure whether to skewer the absurdities of the music business or play along with them.

She’s a half-in-half-out star, aware of the ridiculousness of the dog-and-pony show yet keen on a big shiny ribbon nonetheless. [...]

Reviews of Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights have been mixed, but it’s hard to imagine Charli XCX’s accompanying soundtrack having the same Marmite effect. It ends with the brilliant one-two of My Reminder, a bare-bones banger that has Charli emoting against an electro-clash bass, and Funny Mouth, a perfect dreamlike sigh-off, with lashings of strings and Charli seemingly singing from the bottom of a bog.

It’s fantastically weird album, much better than Brat and almost enough to wash away memories of her moribund mooch at Malahide. (Ed Power)

The Line of Best Fit gives it a 7/10.

Like the film, Charli xcx’s musical rendition suffers from thematic stagnation after the intriguing premise. Although she’s really not to blame, it can’t be helped that the second half feels redundant and one-dimensional due to its helpless wallow in, to borrow from anthemic sugar rush “Dying for You”, “pain and torture”. She still talks about killing each other even five tracks later on “Altars”, ruining her otherwise clever turnaround of Harry Nilsson’s famous line from “One”. To have a motif is one thing, but truly, to repeatedly hit the same level of intensity is another. The film’s problematic dryness and refusal to shed light on the all-around complexities of this toxic love are relayed here. Intentional or not, the 34-minute length is one of the project’s two saviours; any longer and tedium would be inevitable.

The other is Finn Kleane (formerly easyFun)’s opulent production. “Always Everywhere” induces dread beneath the faux-processional music in a manner that begs to be addressed but is impeded by Gareth Murphy’s incredibly restrained orchestration. The strings’ imitation of scraping clanks deliciously coalesce with the leaden bass on “Eyes of the World”, and Sky Ferreira’s chalky voice strides like their vigilant watcher. Even though nothing snaps like “House” – and some, like “Out of Myself” and “My Reminder”, verge on the more run-of-the-mill formulas – Wuthering Heights is Charli xcx’s transitional record that studies her initial sound in retrospect while searching for a new, steely and more organic one. This may be the first taste of her next artistic phase. (Tanatat Khuttapan)

Financial Times reviews it too behind a paywall but seems to be the discordant note as the headline describes it as 'unsatisfying'.