Following the stratospheric success of 2024's Brat and its star-studded remix album, Charli xcx publicly announced that she was ready to do something completely different.
In a sharp left-turn that surprised both fans and critics, the self-described 365 Party Girl traded the neon lights of the club for the windswept moors of West Yorkshire, taking on the task of contributing a song to director Emerald Fennell's film adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.
That song – a gothic, feedback-laced fever dream with a scene-stealing spoken word turn from The Velvet Underground's John Cale – soon grew into an entire project, a companion album for the film written by Charli and produced by Finn Keane, a close collaborator that played a significant role in shaping Brat's bold and unapologetic sound.
"I wanted to dive into a persona, into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar," Charli wrote in a Substack post last year. "Without a cigarette or a pair of sunglasses in sight, it was all totally other from the life I was currently living. I was fucking IN.”
Both Charli and Finn have appeared in an interview with Spotify to discuss the creative process behind the "elegant and brutal" songs they crafted for Wuthering Heights, revealing how they developed the dissonant string textures heard on the film's soundtrack.
"We talked a lot about like, it would be interesting to use strings, but we didn't want to make it this super lush orchestral sound – that would just feel wrong for the film," Finn says.
"The idea was to have strings that were quite rough-sounding, so when we were with the players, we'd have them play very close to the bridge and create this quite harsh sound. We had a small ensemble, so you could hear the details of all the string players, and it would just sound much more rough and textured."
"When you were recording strings in LA yourself, sometimes I would walk in the studio and it sounded so bad," Charli adds. "It was perfect, because it really kind of gave this sort of 'nails-on-a-chalkboard' kind of feeling".
"Thank you for outing me!" Finn responds. "This is when I was playing... just for context, I can't play the violin. I bought this really crappy, cheap violin, and I'd just be in the booth and Charli would walk in, like: 'what the fuck?'"
Speaking to BBC Newsbeat earlier this week, Finn confirmed that it was his less-than-average playing that lent a distinctively coarse feel to the soundtrack's evocative string parts. "There's a lot of me playing a really cheap, small violin, and I can't really play. So it was me just doing these horrible, scratchy sounds," he says.
"When you listen to it, if you hear some really bad raspy playing, that's going to be me rather than the amazing professionals we brought in."
Despite – or perhaps thanks to – Finn's questionable violin skills, the pair have created a soundtrack that many critics have declared is the best thing about the movie – and the album itself looks like it could become Charli's third consecutive chart-topping project in the space of four years.
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