When Charli xcx says her first new material in more than a year is “something entirely new, entirely opposite” to the sound she pursued on the era-defining Brat, she isn’t joking. Taken from the soundtrack to director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the darkly gothic House bears almost no relation in sound or mood to the contents of Brat: it was, she says, inspired by John Cale’s description of the sound of his old mob the Velvet Underground as “elegant and brutal”.
Always skilled and generous at collaboration, here Charli xcx cedes two-thirds of the track’s vocal to Cale. He delivers a monologue – oblique and initially conversational, it turns increasingly ominous – in a voice that’s rich, sonorous and, to a certain kind of music fan at least, immediate recognisable. Weathered by time at age 83, it’s still audibly the same voice that recounted Lou Reed’s grisly short story The Gift on White Light/White Heat 57 years ago.
Moreover, something of Cale’s musical spirit seems to infect the whole track: it isn’t clear whether he actually plays on the song, but regardless of who’s behind the music, its droning strings, shards of jagged feedback-like noise and the sheer quantity of distortion that cakes its final minute all seem to call back to his time with the Velvet Underground. So, in a less direct way, do the agonised howls that xcx unleashes at the song’s conclusion: Cale was always the Velvet Underground member most interested in disrupting their music with unsettling noise, unleashing a series of demonic hisses during The Black Angel’s Death Song and dragging a chair across the studio floor before pushing it into a pile of metal plates a minute into European Son. And the Velvet Underground aren’t the only inspiration here – when the track’s beat belatedly kicks in, you sense the influence of Nine Inch Nails.
How it fits into Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights remains to be seen, although you could, at a push, link the lyrics of Cale’s monologue to the twin fates of Catherine and Heathcliff. Alternately creepy and cathartic, it might just as easily have come from another of xcx’s forthcoming cinematic roles, director Daniel Goldhaber’s movie based on the notorious 1978 mondo horror Faces of Death.
Indeed, given how music of a horror film bent leaps up the charts around Halloween, she might have missed a commercial trick not releasing House a couple of weeks ago. But perhaps that would have been too gimmicky, and in fairness, House doesn’t need a gimmick to work. It’s powerful, striking and rewarding: a sharp left-turn into fertile new territory.
