Towards the end of 2024, Charli xcx received a text from an unknown number that turned out to be the director Emerald Fennell, asking if the singer would like to read the script of her forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Creatively depleted after the biggest year of her career, Charli sublimated herself into the windblown world of Emily Brönte’s only novel and found herself unexpectedly inspired. When Fennell asked if she’d contribute a song to the soundtrack, Charli upped the ante: How about an album? Whether the resulting soundtrack is a Charli xcx album is anyone’s guess—Charli’s included, as she admitted in an essay she published in November 2025. Either way, the chance to step outside of herself and inhabit a world a couple centuries removed from BRAT summer felt like freedom. “I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar,” she wrote. “Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living.” If anything, the songs of Wuthering Heights bear a resemblance to the gothic pop of Charli’s 2013 debut album True Romance. Only this time Charli xcx and longtime collaborator Finn Keane counter breathless hooks and heartstring-tugging melodies (“Chains of Love,” “Dying for You”) with droning strings and bursts of feedback on lead single “House.” There she’s joined by John Cale, formerly of The Velvet Underground, who introduces the haunting track with an ominous spoken-word monologue. It’s a heady brew of doom and desire whose lyrics about pressure and escapism occasionally apply to Charli’s post-BRAT life as much as they do Brönte’s classic tale of passion and possession.