CHARLI XCX TAKES US INTO THE WORLD OF "WUTHERING HEIGHTS" WITH 'CHAINS OF LOVE' AND 'HOUSE'

Listen to the songs below!

Image: Paul Kooiker.

Charli xcx has always had her finger on the pulse within contemporary culture. But with Wuthering Heights, she’s doing something deeper: dissolving herself into a world of mud, longing, obsession and doomed romance. Written for Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Warner Bros. Pictures adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” - in Australian theatres February 12, 2026 - the album finds Charli stepping away from the hyper-modern glow of her recent work and into something colder, darker, and fiercely romantic.

Today, Charli releases Chains Of Love, a song that immediately feels bound to the windswept violence of Emily Brontë’s world. Featuring in the official “Wuthering Heights” trailer, the track pulses with tension and devotion that feels as suffocating as it is intoxicating. It’s a sound that mirrors the film itself: Emerald Fennell’s reimagining of one of the most known literary love stories, starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.

That immersion began, as Charli explains, with a single phone call: “I got a call from Emerald Fennell last Christmas asking whether I would consider working on a song for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I read the script and immediately felt inspired so Finn Keane and I began working on not just one but many songs that we felt connected to the world she was creating.” What followed was a creative escape, away from the density of her last album and into something raw and elemental. As Charli puts it: “After being so in the depths of my previous album I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite. 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.”

Those textures - cold, grit, obsession - run through the album’s first taste, House, a haunting collaboration with The Velvet Underground’s John Cale. The collaboration is rooted in a phrase that became a guiding principle for the entire project.

“A few years ago I watched Todd Haynes’ documentary about The Velvet Underground… One thing that stuck with me was how John Cale described a key sonic requirement of The Velvet Underground. That any song had to be both ‘elegant and brutal’.” That contradiction, beauty sharpened by violence, feels like the perfect lens for Wuthering Heights. Charli admits the phrase stayed with her, shaping every decision: “When working on music for this film, ‘elegant and brutal’ was a phrase I kept coming back to.”

That vulnerability is what defines Wuthering Heights as an album. These aren’t songs that simply soundtrack a film; they ache, linger, and haunt. Charli’s voice moves like Cathy’s spirit across the moors: restless, obsessive, unwilling to be contained.

Wuthering Heights is out February 13th via Atlantic Records.