No one has a bigger blank check to spend right now than Charli XCX, who has been spending her post-Brat days acting, logging movies on Letterboxd, and getting married. The pop star’s first music release since the world turned bright green is a collaboration with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale, for a song on the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights. “House” and its music video premiered on November 10, a combination poem-elegy set to a nerve-racking industrial thrum.
Cale stalks up and down and around an old house, the lines of his poem drifting over the scene. “I’m a prisoner to live for eternity,” he says, comforting Charli, who lies on the floor or drips red wax onto her skin. There’s a vulture in the home, flapping its wings. The whole place is marked by decay and dilapidation. Eventually, Charli’s voice joins, her signature autotune crackling against Cale’s more menacing tone. She wails, alternating between ominous warnings: “I think I’m gonna die in this house,” she says in one, while in another, she points her concern outward: “I think you’re gonna die in this house.” Later, Charli sits beside a grave — her own? The witchy gothic nature of their song captures the haunted, unnerving quality of Emily Brontë’s novel. It’s unlike anything we heard on Brat and unlike anything Charli’s done so far.
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“When I think of Wuthering Heights, I think of many things. I think of passion and pain. I think of England. I think of the moors, I think of the mud and the cold. I think of determination and grit,” Charli explained in a press release as to how she and Cale connected after she watched Todd Haynes’s documentary on Cale’s band. “One thing that stuck with me was how John Cale described a key sonic requirement of the Velvet Underground. That any song had to be both ‘elegant and brutal.’ 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. We got connected, we spoke on the phone, and wow … that voice, so elegant, so brutal. I sent him some songs and we started talking specifically about ‘House.’ We spoke about the idea of a poem. He recorded something and sent it to me.” While the song itself is frightening, Charli’s collaboration with Cale is anything but. Their partnership is not so much a passing of the torch but a sharing of a torch. They might die in this house, but at least they’re in it together.
