CRASH

Featuring the legendary John Cale, "House" — the dark, creaking and handsome opening track of Charli xcx's seventh full-length album — opens the heavy, ornate doors to the dark fantasy of the pop star's own Wuthering Heights; not the Emily Brontë classic, nor the Emerald Fennell blockbuster, but a Gothic romance all her own.Officially, the record acts as a companion album to Fennell's newly released cinematic rendering of Brontë's novel. Yet, in line with the film, the album is more a remix of themes and energies than a proper adaptation of its source material. Rather than the one it shares a title with, Wuthering Heights better resembles another Gothic tale, "Bluebeard": the horror-romance of a young bride alone in her husband's mansion, left only with the instruction not to enter his private study.Any time the project sounds at risk of leaning into mainstream normalcy, you're quickly reminded you're still being guided by an artist who lives at the vanguard, even after the rowdy success of 2024's BRAT. Charli haunts every experimental corner of this love album with disruptive impulses, like horror-movie string screams, giving even the sweetest moments a light inflection of smoky soundstage screeches reminiscent of Joseph Bishara's Insidious franchise film scores.At first, this record feels akin to opening your mail and seeing a wedding invitation from that one girl you kind of know whose favourite song is "Bittersweet Symphony" by the Verve. It could be easy to judge preemptively for its earnestness and schmaltz. However, by "Wall of Sound," listeners have been properly reintroduced to the masterful, glittering production of Finn Keane, who takes the reins from A.G. Cook as lead producer on a full-length XCX project for the first time, having been a pivotal part of her production team for around a decade.Like Cook, SOPHIE and Hannah Diamond, Keane entered Charli's orbit as an original member of PC Music, the now-defunct indie label that changed the face of popular culture by spearheading hyperpop and all that followed in its scorched-earth musical wake. Keane first produced for Charli on her career-best 2017 dual mixtapes Number 1 Angel and Pop 2, serving as the sonic architect behind tracks like "3AM (Pull Up)," "Emotional," "Porsche" and the Carly Rae Jepsen collaboration "Backseat."Fast forward 10 years later to Wuthering Heights, and "Out of Myself" still carries echoes of Jepsen; it's a demon twin to her hit "Call Me Maybe," just without the wink, apology or self-deprecation. Along with several tracks on the record, "Out of Myself" taps into early-2010s radio brightness, yet plays things refreshingly straight to camera.Like so much of the album, "My Reminder" will connect with longtime Angels as a resurrection of Charli's True Romance goth party-girl sensibilities. For Wuthering Heights to share so much DNA with her 2013 debut record is no coincidence from an artist who has worked with precise intention every step of the way. After her recent catapult to superstardom, it reads like a subtle "told you so"; a way of suggesting that the Charli being celebrated has been here the whole time, and audiences have only now caught up."Seeing Things" reaches into that same era of sound with its Bleachers-coded anthemic swells and glossy uplifts, however, it remains the album's weakest moment. The production on the track sounds unintentionally dated, and I found myself genuinely wondering whether it was meant as satire, especially given the recent public feud between Charli and one of the highest-profile pop adversaries imaginable, with whom "Seeing Things" actually sounds somewhat musically aligned."Altars," on the other hand, offers up a Pop Music University seminar that will result in an album highlight for professor XCX's most dedicated pupils. It's Charli's own "Cool" by Gwen Stefani: a soft, mainstream perusal of 1960s Italy — a luminous chestnut-brunette day trip on an album otherwise stacked with more bleached-out, highbrow objectives. It's the icon at her best: a refreshing, unpretentious, self-aware pop star in reflection."Eyes of the World" is a Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style power ballad, still orange-hot from when it landed on our shores after falling down from outer space. Featuring the mythic and mysterious Sky Ferreira, who crescendos alongside Charli in a stadium-ready climax that levels the haunted house this record has taken such care in constructing around you, it's a killer confirmation that the slow burn of Wuthering Heights is, in fact, another work of genius from a prophet still in the prime of her career.Then "Funny Mouth," the best and final song on the record, shows off Charli and her collaborators (Djo among them) at their strangest. A turn-of-the-millennium trip-hop cornucopia, the machine-gun percussive blasts of Portishead knock down the attic door as this track picks up the listener and carries them back down through the house they've become lost in.Charli has described her BRAT album closer "365" as an insane club walk-through, each chapter of the song unfolding in a different setting within a singular club fantasy. By that same logic, "Funny Mouth" is instead a supercut back through the house of Charli's Wuthering Heights, resulting in her and the listener escaping the estate toward a deep-woods meander as she sings, "Everyone sleeps / Everyone wakes up."Wuthering Heights expertly plays with the joys and violence of love, always leaving space for the nuances of both. As the sun finally rises at its finish, it's clear that this album is ultimately an optimistic love story, even if it's a Gothic horror set within Bluebeard's castle.Charli seems grateful to be in love, even if she's found herself in the off-limits study gilded with the skulls of her fictional man's many dead ex-wives. Still, ask any millennial and we'll tell you, in a romance economy like the one we're in now, if he's hot, treats you well, and has a castle of his own, then it may be worth keeping that door shut and minding your business.