"HOUSE"- Charli XCX and John Cale’s Gothic Hymn for Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights

There’s something almost disorienting about hearing Charli XCX and John Cale on the same track. On paper it sounds like a random collision of generations, one artist who made her name turning pop into chrome and chaos, and another who once tore rock apart just to see what was underneath. But then you play House, from Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack, and it stops feeling like a gimmick. It feels like an accident that had to happen.

Cale is an unexpected but strangely fitting choice. He has spent sixty years drifting through the darker corners of music, classically trained, permanently disillusioned, and still capable of making beauty sound vaguely dangerous. The Welsh humidity never really left his voice; there is always something damp and mineral in the way he sings. He was never built for the spotlight. He is the kind of musician who stays in the basement and makes the ceiling shake. Pairing him with Charli is almost perversely logical. She has built her career on surface tension, on the friction between artifice and sincerity. He dismantles structure. She thrives in it until it collapses.

“House” opens like a slow bruise. Cale’s voice drifts in, cracked and heavy, speaking less than singing. You can hear the years in his throat, the exhaustion that comes from having already said too much. Then Charli enters, her tone clean and fragile but never innocent. Together they sound like two people occupying the same building but in different timelines. The track’s mix of electronics and decayed strings makes it hard to tell what century you are in. There is no chorus in the usual sense, just a series of sounds that circle each other, refusing to resolve. It is unnerving in a way that feels deliberate.

The lyrics barely exist, fragments and repetitions, a line about dying in a house that could be literal or metaphorical or both. The song does not seem interested in clarity. It is about atmosphere more than meaning, emotion as architecture. You can tell Charli is pulling herself away from the manic neon of Brat into something slower, colder, more dangerous. Cale’s presence does not soften her; it strips the gloss off. His voice does not carry nostalgia so much as resignation. You can feel two artistic instincts grinding against each other, not harmonizing, just coexisting long enough to create friction.

Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights looks like it will be full of that same tension, polished excess wrapped around rot. “House” works because it sounds like it belongs to that world. It is gothic without turning into costume drama, romantic without being sweet. The production feels damp and metallic, like something corroding in real time. Cale’s lines play like a ghost’s monologue. Charli answers with the kind of restrained panic that never quite breaks through. There is a sense of pressure, of rooms closing in.

What is interesting is how neither of them dominates. Cale does not become a mentor, and Charli does not turn him into a novelty feature. They meet halfway, in a strange liminal space where legacy and pop commerce stop mattering. It is not a collaboration that tries to reconcile the old and the new. It lets them stare at each other across the divide, like two people who know they will never understand one another and do not care to.

The video pushes that idea further. The two wander through a dim, collapsing house, touching but not really connecting. There is wax, shadow, the suggestion of ritual, but no catharsis. It is less performance than endurance. That is what makes it compelling. Both of them look slightly out of place, like they are performing in someone else’s dream.

“House” is not an easy listen, and that is its strength. It is too slow for radio, too abrasive for playlists, too serious for irony. But it lingers. Cale’s gravel and Charli’s clarity do not blend; they scrape. The result is something in between, a half-alive artifact that feels as old as it does current. It is a song that does not beg to be loved. It just stands there, quiet and cold, daring you to stay in the room.