Charli XCX’s new single ‘House’, with John Cale, is out now – listen to the track and watch the video here.
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The single is the first from the singer’s album written for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and it features The Velvet Underground legend Cale. The cinematic, eerie-sounding offering sees the singer move into gothic and industrial rock territory with Cale’s spoken word contributions adding to the sense of foreboding.
“I’m a prisoner / To live for eternity” and “Am I living in another world? / Another world I created / For what?” he says as part of his monologue, while he and Charli join forces in the final third of the track to repeat, “I think I’m gonna die in this house” over dramatic guitars. Cale then returns alone at the end to say, “In every room / I hear silence.”
The video, directed by Mitch Ryan, stars both Charli and Cale as well as dark, shadowy figures, and sees the former pour candle wax on her skin – check it out here.
Explaining how the track came about, Charli said that she got a call from Fennell last Christmas asking if she’d be interested in working on a song for Wuthering Heights. “I read the script and immediately felt inspired so [frequent collaborator] Finn Keane and I began working on not just one but many songs that we felt connected to the world she was creating.
“After being so in the depths of my previous album I was excited to escape into something entirely new, entirely opposite. 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.”
She added that she reached out to Cale after his quote from a Velvet Underground documentary – in which he said that any song by the band had to be both “elegant and brutal” – stuck with her.
“When working on music for this film, ‘elegant and brutal’ was a phrase I kept coming back to,” she said, adding that she felt “so lucky” to get to work with him. “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.
Discussing her music post-’Brat’, her critically and commercially successful 2024 album, Charli told Gwenyth Paltrow on her Goop podcast earlier this month that she’s “exploring a lot of stuff with strings”.
Charli has previously spoken about her love for The Velvet Underground, saying earlier this year that she wanted to make a “Lou Reed era” style album with Clairo and calling the band’s 1967 debut album ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’ the “apex of fine art” last year.
Wuthering Heights, meanwhile, is set for release on February 11, 2026 in the UK and two days later in the US. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi star as Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff respectively.
Also early next year, Charli will appear in the drama film The Moment, based on an original idea by the singer. Directed by Aidan Zamiri, it’s the first co-production from her production company studio365.
