Rating: ★★★

Artist: Charli xcx

Genre: Alternative/indie

Release Date: Feb. 13, 2026

After the cultural moment that was “brat,” Charli xcx faced an inevitable question: What’s the next step after defining the sound of the summer? Rather than escalating the maximalism and spectacle that defined “brat,” Charli turned inward on “Wuthering Heights” — a 12-track album created to soundtrack Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic classic. The result was a restrained, atmosphere-driven project that prioritizes mood and cohesion, reaching impressive production highs while revealing notable weaknesses in its songwriting. 

“Wuthering Heights” is cold, shadowed, and claustrophobic, mirroring the film’s fixation on emotional isolation and inescapable longing. Charli explores love in this album not as liberation but as confinement — a recurring fixation that mirrors the novel’s cycles of obsession, resentment, and recurrence, where desire is inherited rather than chosen. This marks a sharp contrast from her recent works like “brat,” where lives and desire were framed through excess and self-assertion. 

The album’s opening track, “House” featuring The Velvet Underground singer John Cale, immediately establishes this tonal shift. The song unfolds like a warning — Cale’s spoken-word monologue looms over screeching strings as Charli repeats, “I think I’m gonna die in this house.” This became one of the project’s most effective moments — both theatrical and unsettling — encapsulating the album’s central fixation on desire as suffocating and inescapable. 

Across the record, Charli demonstrates an artistic commitment to sonic cohesion. Tracks like “Wall of Sound” and “Always Everywhere” swell with orchestral tension, creating an atmosphere that feels carefully constructed and emotionally heavy. Strings replace synths in this album, weaving through nearly every track and grounding the record with a persistent sense of dread.

Meanwhile, “Dying for You” stands out as a subtle point of convergence, folding a steady club-ready undercurrent into the album’s otherwise symphonic framework. Here, Charli’s pop roots resurface most clearly — not through excess or instant gratification, but through restraint. The song’s synthetic pulse never overtakes the piece; instead, it flickers beneath swelling strings, allowing movement to exist without release. Instead of disrupting the album’s cohesion, this tension reinforces it, translating Charli’s dance-pop sensibilities into the same claustrophobic emotional world that defines the record. 

Despite the album’s strong sense of atmosphere and sonic cohesion, its middle stretch exposes its limitations. Several tracks rely heavily on the production in the film to sustain interest, as the lyrics themselves remain frustratingly surface-level yet abstract, rather than fully exploring the complex emotions they gesture toward. Similarly, the melodious production, while lush and cohesive, occasionally prioritizes texture over dynamic risk-taking, limiting moments of surprise or release. 

On tracks like “Seeing Things” and “Altars,” Charli signals toward emotional intensity but stops short of specificity, favoring repetition and abstract phrasing over narrative or emotional progression. Lines like “I think I’m seeing things that are not there (See — not there)/ …/ I think I’m seeing shadows of your hair” evoke a vague sense of longing without going deeper. 

“Eyes of the World” featuring Sky Ferreira prioritizes texture and atmosphere at the expense of lyrical conviction. Echoing synths, reverb-heavy percussion, and almost ghostly vocal doubling create a dense, immersive soundscape. The lyrics hint at themes of surveillance, self-perception, and existential pressure — “Do you see the stars in my eyes?/ Do you see me frozen in time?” — but they remain abstract and fragmented without an emotional anchor. “Eyes of the World” risks feeling more like a mood piece than a fully developed song; it is sonically intriguing but leaves the audience wanting more clarity. 

“Wuthering Heights” may not redefine Charli’s artistry, but it marks a meaningful transition. It showcases her willingness to step away from the neon chaos of “brat” into something quieter, starker, and more unresolved. As a soundtrack, “Wuthering Heights” succeeds in building a unified emotional world. 

As a standalone album, however, it often feels deliberately constrained. Charli flirts with sonic brutality and emotional unraveling, but rarely allows the music to fully collapse into either. Even the album’s pacing reflects this sense of restraint: Tracks unfold methodically, maintaining a consistent mood but rarely venturing into the kind of tension or unpredictability that might make the emotional impact feel sharper or more instant. While its lyrical shortcomings hold it back from greatness, the album’s atmosphere and sonic ambition offer a compelling glimpse into where Charli’s creative instincts may be heading next.