“I think I’m gonna die in this house,” Charli xcx murmurs on “House,” the creaking-lintel lead single from her companion album to “Wuthering Heights”, directed with customary menace by Emerald Fennell. It’s more a confession than a premonition, delivered like she’s already haunting the place. The track’s title is blunt to the point of parody—just “House”—as if the moors have been downsized into a floor plan. Enter John Cale, drifting through with a funereal spoken-word cameo that feels beamed in from some prestige-art purgatory. The effect is gothic by way of a dry ice machine: austere, theatrical, and faintly camp.

The promise of “House” suggests a full pivot into candlelit austerity—a Charli album embalmed in strings and storm clouds. But Wuthering Heights (the album, pointedly un-quoted, as if it’s trying to outgrow its source material) refuses total self-seriousness. Instead, it’s a feverishly romantic valentine to the film, corseted in orchestral swells yet still beating with Charli’s signature chrome-plated pop. There are violins, yes—sawing away like they’re auditioning for a BBC period drama—but even at her most windswept, the synths land with a nightclub exactitude similar to 2024’s BRAT. The moors, it turns out, have a subwoofer.

“Dying for You,” one of the record’s true talismans, barrels in like a chandelier swinging loose from the ceiling—strings in full melodramatic bloom, kick drum calibrated for moral collapse. “Always Everywhere” is symphonic in the way a panic attack is symphonic: swelling, engulfing, strings climbing toward some invisible rafters before giving way beneath her. On “Eyes of the World,” she enlists Sky Ferreira, pop’s patron saint of beautiful stasis. “The eyes of the world / Keep me believing in me,” the pair belt, a line that mirrors Charli’s feverish self-mythologizing. If this album began as an accessory to Emerald Fennell’s lacquered psychodrama, it ends as something way more self-authored.