Brat is over. Yes. The neon-lime-green album with the bold black letters that hit pop culture in 2024 like a thunderstorm. Quick. Inevitable. Strong. Maybe destructive. Wait, no, that’s not true. Not destructive. More like a storm that pours rain down on earth, watering soil and plants. Watering so something new could be born. That something new is exactly why Brat is over now. That something new is Charli xcx’sWuthering Heights era—an era that we finally (!) got the first sweet taste of through yesterday’s release of the single House. An era that is completely, beautifully, captivatingly, dreamingly, disturbingly the opposite of Brat.
To explain everything in a logical way, I probably need to start by introducing the Wuthering Heights era, because maybe you haven’t heard. Maybe you did a digital detox in the past, I don’t know, for nine months, and didn’t know that the Cambridge-born pop icon is going to release an entire album written as a soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s erotic goth drama adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the Victorian novel written by Emily Brontë. To be fair, so far, we haven’t seen much of the movie. Except for a dramatic poster showing the two leads, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, captured in a romantic, longing pose, and a trailer released in September. But now, we have House as well. A trippy, dark, electric poem-kind-of-song by Charli in collaboration with John Cale, the Welsh musician and founding member of the rock band The Velvet Underground who has been in the industry for around six incredible decades.
“When I think of Wuthering Heights, I think of many things. I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the Moors; I think of the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit,” Charli says in the press notes to the release. Something you can definitely see while watching the music video for House. You see the cold. Mud, yeah. Grit, not so much. But there are dark trees without leaves. Their thin branches reaching out like thorns. The singer running through the night wearing a white dress. Her black hair shining and moving with the wind like the feathers of a raven. Opening its wings as if to rise. But chained to a bed in an abandoned house. Shining like the fur of a horse galloping through the wilderness. There is John Cale, like some sort of exorcist, priest or old master of the area. “Can I speak to you privately for a moment?” he asks, closing the distance to Charli. Then you see him. Digging what seems to be a grave. Again, it's dark. It’s cold. There is passion, and there is pain. A bit scary, and not much left of the rebellious party girl we’ve seen in summer 2024.
Everything started around Christmas last year, when Emerald Fennell (who, by the way, is also the mind behind Saltburn) reached out to Charli to ask if she was willing to collaborate on a song for her Wuthering Heights adaptation. But once the singer-songwriter read the script, she naturally was so inspired and captured by its romantic, raw, gloomy energy that instead of one song, she just wrote an entire album. An album that connects with Fennell’s world and the emotional landscape of Heathcliff and Catherine. With the drama and the tragedy. “After being so in the depths of my previous album, I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite,” Charli says herself. We should be happy to read that, because we finally got the answer to how any pop icon, even one as successful and popular as Charli, could continue after such a huge thunderstorm-like success as what Brat was.
Luckily, we don’t have to worry about Charli. Yes, she is the never-ending-party girl, but since the beginning of her career and her breakthrough in 2014, she has also managed to constantly reinvent herself. There was the Boom Clap era, for example. The “I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn” era. The Brat era. Now she’s rising like a mystical raven in a way darker, more serious, yet electrifying style, as you can see in House. We saw her playing herself, just a bit meaner and more diva-like, in the comedy series Overcompensating. In the future, we will see her in Daniel Goldhaber’s remake of the 1978 cult horror movie Faces of Death, in Greg Araki’s erotic thriller I Want Your Sex, in Cathy Yan’s independent film The Gallerist, as well as Julia Jackman’s period fantasy 100 Nights Of Hero. Just to name a few.
Anyway, we can’t wait to see more of this new Charli, and we can’t wait to listen to the entire album that comes with Wuthering Heights. The movie will be released in February 2026. It’s going to be a long winter, I know. We have to try and be patient, but at least now we have House to make the time go by quicker. A song that is elegant and brutal. One last fun fact for you: 'Elegant and brutal' is a description John Cale once used in a documentary about The Velvet Underground. A description Charli internalised like a mantra and what motivated her eventually to make the call to get the Welsh musician on board. Now you know everything, I promise. Ah, wait. She also sings, “I think I'm gonna die in this house.” Now you can interpret the song’s title yourself. That’s it.
