Charli XCX
Corbis via Getty Images
Charli XCX’s got crowds around the world dancing in lime green light all through 2024 with her smash album Brat, its subsequent remix album, and the accompanying Brat Tour and Sweat Tour. For her next musical act, the British songstress is making a hard turn toward the avant-garde, spearheading the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation.
“House,” a first taste of the music featured in the film, is out now, and demonstrates how Charli’s involvement in the project was a refreshing challenge for her after Brat. “I read the script and immediately felt inspired so [frequent collaborator] Finn Keane and I began working on not just one but many songs that we felt connected to the world [Fennell] was creating. After being so in the depths of my previous album, I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite,” she said.
The song features contributions from an unexpected source: The Velvet Underground’s John Cale. Charli’ found inspiration in Todd Haynes’s 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground and Cale’s approach to making music with the legendary rock band.
“One thing that stuck with me was how John Cale described a key sonic requirement of The Velvet Underground. That any song had to be both ‘elegant and brutal.’ I got really stuck on that phrase,” she said. “When working on music for this film, ‘elegant and brutal was a phrase I kept coming back to.” She later reached out to Cale himself to get his opinion on what she had made. The two ended up collaborating on what became “House.” “We spoke about the idea of a poem. He recorded something and sent it to me. Something that only John could do,” she said. “I feel so lucky to have been able to work with John on this song.”
Cale’s words make up the lion’s share of the haunting track as they each repeat “I think I’m gonna die in this house.”
“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 / I was thinking, ‘What is this place?’ / I thought it would be perfect,” Cale says. “Am I living in another world? / Another world I created / For what? / If it’s beauty / Do you see beauty? / If there’s beauty / Say it’s enough.”
Wuthering Heights is in theaters Feb. 13.