FEATURE:
Chains of Love
PHOTO CREDIT: Monica Schipper/Getty Images
How Charli xcx Is Turning to Film More Than Music After BRAT
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THERE are a couple of new…
PHOTO CREDIT: Charli xcx
Charli xcx tracks out that see her move in a different direction. I am going to come to an NME article, that reacts to a Charli xcx Substack post. After the popularity of 2024’s BRAT and everything that followed, there were a lot of eyes on her. BRAT was this massive success and was possibly the greatest albums of last year. Charli xcx was touring a lot and there were a lot of things happening. Promotion and the remix album for BRAT. On 13th February, the day before Valentine’s Day – I am not sure if that is deliberately chosen, as there is this gothic romance and tragedy at the heart of the novel -, Wuthering Heights is released. Coinciding with the release of Emerald Fennell’s modern adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel (a loose adaptation to be honest), these are all original songs. It will be really fascinating. I was sort of hoping there would be a cover of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, though that may seem a bit meta! However, like Kate Bush – an artist I feel Charli xcx is inspired by -, the London artist is being influenced by film more than music at the moment. Given how she is contributing to a film soundtrack, it is to be expected that she would be in that mindset. However, I think it is more the visual aspects and cinematic nature of film that is enforcing her moves. She released the single, House, which features John Cale. The new track, Chains of Love, is out today (14th November). The two songs are very different, and they are both worlds away from BRAT and its (neon green) world. Shades of brown, black, pink and red, there are deeper hues, but also these brighter elements. I want to start with NME and their reaction to a fascinating Substack post from Charli xcx:
“Charli XCX has said she’s “currently feeling more inspired by film than by music” after being left “stuck, empty and barren” after her breakthrough album ‘Brat‘.
The singer has started a new Substack, where she wrote about the process of making Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack after the huge success of ‘Brat’. She’s recently taken to the big screen with acclaimed roles in the movies Erupcja, 100 Nights of Hero, and Sacrifice while next year will see the release of her starring in Mother Nature, The Gallerist and The Moment.
She professed that it has been a “fucking blessing and relief” to be experiencing “overwhelming creativity” after making ‘Brat’, where she “had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore.
“When I vocalized this, [husband and The 1975 drummer] George [Daniel] said ‘Yeah, but you always feel this way. We all do’. And he’s right, we do, but it felt so potent this time, sort of like being hit by a truck and left on the side of the road to bleed out,” she wrote.
She went on to speak about her experience of touring ‘Brat’, writing that by the end of ‘Brat’, “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”.
There are some interesting takeaways from the Substack post. I shall mention Kate Bush again briefly, in the sense there is a Wuthering Heights connection. Also, Bush was influenced by film and you can very much see her albums as filmic and cinematic. Someone who was a very visual artist. For Charli xcx, it is revealing what she says about feeling spent. Birthing an album that was very personal and took a lot out of her. When it was out in the world and gave people such joy, maybe that created this sense of exhaustion, pressure and loss. Having dedicated so much time and energy to BRAT, following that or try to write again so soon was like getting blood out of a stone. Music of that same vibe, anyway. Anyone who was expecting a BRAT 2 and another album with that sense of energy, vibe and sound would have been asking an awful lot of Charli xcx. I do hope that she gets some big and great film roles. At the moment, there have been bits and bobs and there is stuff in the pipeline. However, you feel like Charli xcx could (and should) appear in a range of brilliant films. From action through to comedy, she has this range and you feel she can inhabit so many great roles. Maybe a music biopic, where she is cast as another iconic artist. However, this section of her Substack stood out:
“Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating. I’m enjoying acting, I’m enjoying writing, I’m enjoying watching and I’m above all enjoying discovering a new craft. Those things feel really enriching and instinctual to me at the moment but also music is a limb I will probably never fully be able to cut from my body despite trying quite hard to do so at points. When Emerald approached me with an open mind and a total willingness for me to explore I thought… ok I can do something cool here. I can write songs from a different perspective and I can think about these songs as purely serving the film they’ve been written for. For me that’s a totally different approach and finding a new approach always feels like a lifeline to a new way of creating. 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. I also know that I’m enjoying talking about the work here in long form. When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points. I’m writing through the lens of the screenplay I read and only occasionally checking in with my own internal narratives. Most likely it’s not something I will tour. I’d just like the songs to live as songs, within and adjacent to the film”.
It will be interesting see what Charli xcx creates with Wuthering Heights. The two songs we have heard so far might indicate what we will get from the film. If House is more Horror and this darker track with a great spoken part from John Cale, Chains of Love reminds me of Rahim Redcar (Christine and The Queens) and their work. Both different to what she has produced before, you can tell these songs are made for the screens. If BRAT was more for the clubs, this is Charli xcx thinking in a more expansive and bigger (and less sweaty and intense) way. People were wowed by House. It was a left-turn. A song that has this terror and darkness. Chains of Love provides something more open and less suffocated. I do wonder, if Charli xcx releases a new studio album after Wuthering Heights, it will follow the same lines. I think cinema will take a front row seat in her imagination. That Substack post where Charli xcx discusses the aftermath of BRAT and what she says here: “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. I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way”. Cinema and its possibilities not at the forefront. I do feel that Pop artists have connected with cinema, though I feel others will follow a similar path to Charli xcx. Wuthering Heights will be a fascinating album, and we hope that next year finds Charli xcx in some amazing films. I think she will appear in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film but, other than that, what other roles are in store? We shall see. However, these two fresh and fascinating tracks from Charli xcx sees her embrace a new medium and direction. A really phenomenal one. Not only does Charli xcx want to appear in cinema more. I feel that we will see her future music take on a more filmic lens. These wonderful and distinct track from a…
MODERN music icon.