Charli xcx Wuthering Heights
Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights channels gothic romance into widescreen pop, trading neon hyper-pop for string-stung dread and theatrical intensity. Critics agree the record's most compelling moments cast obsession as spectacle: “House featuring John Cale”, “Dying for You” and “Eyes of the World featuring Sky Ferreira”
The best song is "Chains of Love" because its trailer use and tortured-romance production make it the album's standout.
There is insufficient review content to assess the album's strengths or weaknesses.
Best for listeners looking for sensuality and romance, starting with House featuring John Cale and Dying for You.
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Full consensus notes
Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights channels gothic romance into widescreen pop, trading neon hyper-pop for string-stung dread and theatrical intensity. Critics agree the record's most compelling moments cast obsession as spectacle: “House featuring John Cale”, “Dying for You” and “Eyes of the World featuring Sky Ferreira” are repeatedly cited as the album's showstoppers, while “Chains of Love” and “Wall of Sound” surface as anthemic, bruising highlights. Across reviews, those tracks emerge as the best songs on Wuthering Heights because they fuse operatic arrangements with sharp pop hooks and a persistent, moody instability.
The critical consensus is measured but clear: Wuthering Heights earned a 63.6/100 consensus score across 10 professional reviews, praised for its cinematic orchestration, gothic imagery and willingness to replace pure immediacy with dramatic payoff. Reviewers consistently note the album's industrial distortion, atonal textures and theatrical persona as strengths that deepen Charli's songwriting, with John Cale's ominous presence and Sky Ferreira's cameo singled out for adding genuine spine to the record's romantic/toxic narrative. At the same time, some critics find the second half repetitive and the grandiosity occasionally at odds with pop concision, producing a mixed but often admiring critical reception.
Taken together, the reviews position Wuthering Heights as a bold, risky chapter in Charli xcx's discography - not a unanimous triumph but a compelling experiment where the best tracks reward repeated listening and the album's cinematic ambition secures its place as a winter soundtrack of longing, madness and devotion. Scroll down for full reviews and track-by-track reactions.
Critics' Top Tracks
The standout songs that made critics take notice
House featuring John Cale
9 mentions
"the release of House, the first single ... strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset"— The Guardian
Dying for You
9 mentions
"Dying For You’ dips into rave energy, the steady pulse lifting that torrent of words"— Clash Music
Eyes of the World featuring Sky Ferreira
9 mentions
"The most toxic elements... peak with "Eyes of the World," featuring Sky Ferreira on vocals and a steady pulsing heartbeat"— Consequence
the release of House, the first single ... strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset
Track Ratings
How critics rated each track, relative to this album (0-100). Only tracks that made critics feel something are rated.
House featuring John Cale
Wall of Sound
Dying for You
Always Everywhere
Chains of Love
Out of Myself
Open up
Seeing Things
Altars
Eyes of the World featuring Sky Ferreira
My Reminder
Funny Mouth
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What Critics Are Saying
Deep insights from 11 critics who reviewed this album
Critic's Take
Charli xcx leans into the film's lush eroticism on Wuthering Heights, making the best songs feel like cinematic set pieces. The middle section - especially “Dying for You”, “Always Everywhere” and the trailer-ready “Chains of Love” - is where the album soars, marrying orchestral swells to electro edge in a way that captures Cathy and Heathcliff's all-consuming passion. The ending tracks falter a touch, but the record's front-loaded drama makes it easy to name the best tracks on Wuthering Heights as those middle songs where Charli finds epic pop in tragic romance.
Key Points
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The best song is "Chains of Love" because its trailer use and tortured-romance production make it the album's standout.
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The album's core strengths are its sensual, gothic atmosphere and the middle section's orchestral-electro blend that captures tragic passion.
Themes
Critic's Take
There is a clear sense that Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights finds its strongest moments in theatrical, gothic pop - songs like “Wall of Sound” and “Eyes of the World” tower as the album's best tracks, and “Chains of Love” and “Always Everywhere” keep the momentum cinematic. Robin Murray writes with a relish for the album's darkness and melodrama, calling many pieces "gorgeous" and "deliberately grotesque" while praising Charli's direct songwriting.
Key Points
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The album's core strengths are its cinematic gothic production and Charli's direct, literate songwriting that balances gorgeous and grotesque.
Themes
Critic's Take
Rhian Daly's review reads like a fan of her early, darker pop, arguing that the record revisits the mood of True Romance but with sharper experience and teeth. Ultimately the album is recommended as a winter soundtrack of yearning and discontent, even if it might not spark a new cultural phenomenon.
Key Points
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The album's core strengths are its cinematic gothic persona, dramatic lyrics about toxic obsession, and confident revisitation of earlier darker pop.
Themes
Critic's Take
Charli XCX takes a bold tonal leap on Wuthering Heights, and the best songs - like “Chains of Love” and “Funny Mouth” - show why she still commands pop drama with brutal elegance. Tafoya writes with a critic's relish, noting how the string arrangements give songs an uplift that barrels down into physicality, so the best tracks feel both vivid and dangerous. Overall the album is inventive and occasionally undone by pop conventionality, but its standout songs make the reinvention worthwhile.
Key Points
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“Chains of Love” is best because it rebuilds Charli’s earlier grandeur with booming, true-romance scale production.
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The album’s core strength is blending pop hooks with orchestral strings to create vivid, cinematic atmospheres.
Themes
Critic's Take
Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights thrives in its gothic grandeur and pop immediacy, with standout moments like “House” and “Open Up” delivering the album's most unforgettable emotions. The reviewer's voice savors the drama - calling the John Cale-assisted opener a "witchy, cello-laden darkwave concoction" while praising “Open Up” as the most romantic and devastating track. Yet the critique is measured and specific, noting how songs like “Seeing Things” and “Altars” are circumscribed by pop structures even as sweeping strings and production elevate much of the material. Overall, the best songs on Wuthering Heights are those that let the orchestration and Charli's warped vocals collide into cinematic, bodice-ripping moments.
Key Points
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The interlude "Open Up" is the emotional centerpiece because it condenses the album's fatalistic heartache into under 90 seconds.
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The album's core strengths are its cinematic strings, bold production collisions, and Charli's altered vocals that render a gothic, pop-forward soundtrack.
Themes
Critic's Take
Ultimately the album reads as a transitional, retrospective project that finds its clearest triumphs in those early, aggressively vivid tracks.
Key Points
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The album’s core strengths are its dense, claustrophobic production and sharp, punchy lyricism that recall Charli xcx’s early sound.
Themes
Critic's Take
The review argues these best songs conjure Brontë’s terrible complexity without theatrical quotation marks, trading neon hyperpop for pixelated, violin-stung gothic modernity. Overall, the critic presents the album as emotionally direct and sonically daring, the best tracks proving both weird experimentation and irresistible hooks.
Key Points
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The album’s core strength is its gothic atmosphere that marries classical strings with industrial electronica to realize Brontë’s emotional complexity.
Themes
Critic's Take
The review’s voice lingers on the album’s jagged strings and industrial drums, noting how tracks like “Dying for You” and “Funny Mouth” marry rave and atonal textures to pop smarts. It reads as praise that this soundtrack functions as more than a side-hustle, delivering some of the best tracks on Wuthering Heights while keeping her pop instincts intact.
Key Points
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The album’s core strengths are its blend of adventurous, industrial textures with uniformly strong pop songwriting.
Themes
Critic's Take
Charli xcx makes a deliberate left turn on Wuthering Heights, leaning into moors-core and Gothic-romantic drama with bruised tenderness and theatrical heft. Jon Dolan’s voice relishes the mood shifts, praising how songs like “Wall of Sound” and “Dying for You” trade hyper-pop gloss for dread and intimacy. The result reads like Charli’s most tradition-minded record, equal parts Kate Bush homage and modern pop transgression, which answers the question of the best songs on Wuthering Heights by pointing to those high-drama, vow-to-die moments.
Key Points
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The album’s core strengths are its moors-core atmosphere, dramatic vocal commitments, and successful melding of Gothic tradition with pop textures.
Themes
Ir
Critic's Take
The review text contains only header metadata and no substantive commentary on Charli xcx's Wuthering Heights, so there are no best songs to identify. Because Ed Power's piece lacks descriptive content or track mentions, I cannot reliably state which tracks like "House featuring John Cale" or "Wall of Sound" are best. This absence prevents a faithful recreation of his voice about the album's highlights.
Key Points
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No best song could be identified because the review text contains no discussion of individual tracks.
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There is insufficient review content to assess the album's strengths or weaknesses.