Wuthering Heights

Charli is one of the definitive pop artists of our time, but in soundtracking a classic story, she never fully transcends our moment.

Wuthering Heights isn’t a soundtrack or a score. It’s a fully realized album, with great songs that add a whole new musical texture to her always-changing sensibility.

A solid slab of new music from her – the perfect soundtrack for a winter of yearning and discontent.

It’s a strange and often beautiful record, proving that Charli XCX is indeed the perfect artist to soundtrack this new twist on Brontë.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of this album as a creative exercise than an artistic statement. And creative exercise or not, Wuthering Heights still yields some beautiful moments.

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.

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.

One can’t help but feel that the project falls just short of the gleeful histrionics that both the film and novel beg for. .... But these are minor quibbles on an otherwise delectable pop album and a worthy companion piece to Fennell’s audacious film.

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.

Done and dusted in 35 minutes, it’s tempting to view ‘Wuthering Heights’ as a studio palette cleanser, a means for Charli xcx to fully divest herself from the ‘Brat’ era. Yet the music itself so much more rewarding than that definition allows – at times gorgeous, at others deliberately grotesque, it offers a series of dark gothic fantasies that inhabit a transformative realm.

Wuthering Heights is a competent, glossy synth-pop work, with a handful of soaring highs that are offset by a couple of duds.

This Wuthering Heights album is definitely evocative and occasionally cerebral, urging listeners to engage with its dramatic chordal changes with agitation and high alert.

Charli XCX’s “soundtrack” stands firmly on its own and must be judged accordingly, not only as one of the year’s key releases but as a significant contribution to modern pop.

It “accompanies” the film. It’s also the best part of it; a correction: Brontë’s gothica as something that clings and stains. And Charli, thoughtfully and tastefully, suffusing that stain into her continued ascendancy.

The album sometimes feels as if Charli committed fully to her concept, but didn’t allow herself to branch out even further, reach higher, express – or even abandon – more. It is a symphony, but not quite an opus. Yet as it stands, this might actually be her most successful album.

At its peak, it really does sweep the listener away into a world where passion is all-powerful and all-consuming, for better and for worse, with Charli finding the capacity for epic drama within her talents for addictive pop. Like the movie that inspired it, there’s messiness here — and like the movie, the messiness feels like the point.

Wuthering Heights the album is an independent work of art. .... With a voiceover from Cale that sounds a bit like a corny narrative piped out in a theme park ride or immersive experience, the song ["House"] builds into a majestic, doomy dirge. But the rest of Wuthering Heights is a pop album, if a gothic one. ‘Dying For You’ and ‘My Reminder’ are immediate hits, while ‘Always Everywhere’ and ‘Chains of Love’ carry the swooping melodrama of a 1980s power ballad.