Fresh from releasing House, a duet with John Cale and the most song to be taken from her upcoming soundtrack album for Emerald Fennell’s movie adaption of Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights, Charli XCX has been opening up on the creative block she experienced following the huge success of her 2024 album, Brat.
Writing on her new Substack in a post titled ‘Running on the spot in a dream’, Charli XCX says that, after Brat, “I had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore.”
The star compares the creation and release of an album to carrying and birthing a baby, and says that once it’s out in the world, she usually moves on and looks somewhere else for fulfilment.
“But with brat, my latest baby, people seemed to care about her more than usual,” she writes. “So I stuck with her and watched her grow.”
Brat was released in June 2024 and inspired a cultural phenomenon that came to be known as Brat Summer, with the album’s signature green colour and simple font popping up everywhere.
There was also a remix album, Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat, which was released in October, stretching the campaign into Autumn and Winter, while a lengthy tour - including a polarising performance at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2025 - extended it still further.
“It was fun, don’t get me wrong,” Charli XCX says of her star-making era. “I reached new highs and new lows and both were equally important. But by the end of the process I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior. I still love her, don’t get me wrong but I was itching to move on and was simultaneously frustrated that I was so depleted that I couldn’t.”
Describing her post-Brat creative comedown, Charli says: “I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way. I couldn’t really even listen to music without feeling depressed. Everything felt monotonous and boring, even if it wasn’t.”
Salvation came in the form of a phone call from Fennell, who suggested that Charli might like to write a song for her version of Wuthering Heights. After being inspired by the script, though, the star says that she pitched the idea of a full album, which is seemingly what we’re going to get. Or is it?
“This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli xcx album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out. All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now and that I feel passionate about what I’ve created and how it’s been created.”
Wuthering Heights will be released in February 2026. Presumably, we’ll get to hear the rest of Charli XCX’s soundtrack songs around the same time.
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