Charli xcx has let the cat out of the bag regarding her contributions to the upcoming remake of Wuthering Heights, for which her songs will also double as her next album. The first single from the project is “House” featuring 83-year-old Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale, which will be out Monday (Nov. 10). The film, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, hits theaters on Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14),
“I got a call from Emerald Fennell last Christmas asking whether I would consider working on a song for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights,” Charli wrote on Instagram. “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. After being so in the depths of my previous album [2024’s massive hit brat], I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite.”
The artist had separately become “really taken” with Todd Haynes’ 2021 self-titled Velvet Underground documentary and said she kept coming back to a phrase uttered therein by Cale: “any song has to be both elegant and brutal.” “I got really stuck on that phrase. I wrote it down in my Notes app and would pull it up from time to time and think about what he meant,” she recalled.
The opportunity to set it to music came in late April when Charli was on tour in Austin, Texas. “Finn and I went to the studio and wrote the bones for a song that would eventually become ‘House.’ When the summer ended, I was still ruminating on John’s words. So, I decided to reach out to him to get his opinion on the songs that his phrase had so deeply inspired, but also to see whether he might want to collaborate on any,” she said.
After the pair spoke on the phone (“wow … that voice, so elegant, so brutal”), Charli sent Cale sone of the songs. “We started talking specifically about ‘House.’ We spoke about the idea of a poem. He recorded something and sent it to me. Something that only John could do. And it was … well, it made me cry.”
Wuthering Heights is the first of several high-profile film projects in the works for Charli, led by the A24 film The Moment, which is based on her original idea by Charli and will also star the U.K. pop maven. It will feature Alexander Skarsgård, Rosanna Arquette, Jamie Demetriou, Kylie Jenner, Rachel Sennott, Kate Berlant, Arielle Dombasle and Hailey Benton Gates and is due in theaters next year.
She has additional acting roles in Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex and a remake of the 1978 schlock horror classic Faces of Death.
