Charli XCX has entered a new era—feral, literary, and burning at the edges. The pop innovator has announced Wuthering Heights, her next album and the full-scale follow-up to Brat. The record lands February 13 via Atlantic, and arrives in tandem with a brand-new track, the pulsing, fever-dream single “Chains of Love.”
The title isn’t metaphorical—Wuthering Heights was born directly out of Charli’s creative collaboration with filmmaker Emerald Fennell on her upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. On Substack, Charli wrote that she rang Fennell asking what she wanted from her script. “She coyly suggested ‘A song?’ and I suggested ‘An album?’ because why not?” Charli explained.
“I wanted to dive into persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured… full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar. Without a cigarette or sunglasses in sight, it felt totally other from the life I was living. I was fucking IN.”
That creative plunge quickly became a year-long immersion. The album took shape primarily with Finn Keane—the British producer formerly known as Easyfun—whose fingerprints are all over Charli’s more experimental edges.
She revealed that the pair worked under a shared mantra borrowed from Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground documentary. In it, John Cale famously describes the band’s rule: everything must sound “elegant and brutal.” Charli and Keane treated that line like scripture. “We started to live by this description as we created songs for the Wuthering Heights album throughout most of this year,” she wrote. Keane even followed her on tour, the two renting studio spaces on off-days and building the record in motion.
The resulting 12-track album opens with “House,” Charli’s recent collaboration with Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale.
The track features Cale’s spoken-word presence—culminating in a jagged, screamed chorus: “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” The moment left Charli in tears. On Instagram, she described her longtime devotion to Cale’s work and the surreal power of hearing him lay down vocals on her song. The collaboration, she admitted, was a full-circle shock: the band that shaped Cale’s legend is the same one she studied while crafting this new record’s sonic world.
Wuthering Heights arrives after her explosive Brat cycle—complete with its deluxe versions and chaotic remixes—but this new project signals a pivot. It’s Charli stepping into fiction, into atmosphere, into a dark romantic excess that feels both theatrical and deeply personal.
If Brat was neon, acidic, and club-streaked, Wuthering Heights promises something moodier, stranger, and deliciously unruly. A storm rolling in from the moors—Charli XCX at her most “elegant and brutal.”
