Charli xcx’s Wuthering Heights plays like a soundtrack that refuses to act like wallpaper. It’s built around strings that grind, drones that sit under everything, and production choices that keep interrupting the easy satisfaction you expect from a pop writer this good. The hooks are still there. They do not arrive as relief. They arrive as insistence.
“House” makes that point immediately. John Cale’s spoken section doesn’t feel like a novelty add on, it feels like the track’s spine, a cold voice at the center of the room. Around it, the sound is heavy and ugly on purpose, distortion, weight, jagged strings, an industrial rock crush that drags the song forward. It’s a severe opener, and it sets the rules for what follows. This record is not chasing prettiness. It’s chasing pressure.
The early run stays in that lane. “Wall of Sound” takes the name literally in terms of density, but the density isn’t comfort, it’s friction. The strings sit in dissonant clusters and sustained tones that don’t resolve cleanly, while drones fill the gaps so there’s no air to breathe. “Dying for You” adds more motion, but it keeps the same tension, like the track is moving because it has to.
Even when the album moves toward cleaner pop structure, it keeps tightening. “Always Everywhere” and “Chains of Love” read like love song titles until the music and delivery turn them into containment. The rhythm and vocal writing can be direct, but the arrangement keeps leaning on unease, sharp string lines, stiff framing, interruptions that stop anything from turning soft.
The middle section focuses on the body and the mind at war. “Out of Myself,” “Open up,” and “Seeing Things” sit in a space where the production keeps breaking the surface, piano lines that feel exposed, vocal fragments that arrive like flashes, distortion used like a tool, not a decoration. The album keeps returning to the same sensation, obsession as a physical state, not a mood.
“Altars” pushes the ritual side of the record, less song as scene, more song as fixation loop. It’s part of how the album stays coherent, it keeps reusing its own materials, strings, drones, abrasive textures, until they start to feel like the record’s language rather than a one off “soundtrack” choice.
“Eyes of the World” is the clearest feature moment. Sky Ferreira’s voice brings a flat, distant edge that fits the album’s emotional temperature. The track is shaped around prominent violin presence, with a build that moves from restrained sections into a bigger distorted chorus where the voices blend. It’s one of the album’s most obvious peaks, but it never turns warm. It just gets louder and sharper.
“My Reminder” and “Funny Mouth” close the record without offering a comedown. “Funny Mouth” lands on a blunt refrain, “Unfunny words from your funny mouth,” and it’s a good summary of what this soundtrack does best, intimacy framed as damage control, romance treated as a choke point. The ending doesn’t resolve the tension, it locks it in.
If there’s a risk here, it’s the one this kind of project always has, concept doing work that songwriting should be doing. But the album avoids that most of the time by making the sound choices structural. The strings are not garnish. The drones are not atmosphere. The disruption is the point.
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