Charli xcx teams up with The Velvet Underground’s John Cale for eerie new track ‘House’

Charli xcx has returned with ‘House’, a spectacular sonic left-turn from her ‘BRAT’ era that sees her join forces with none other than John Cale of The Velvet Underground for a dissonant, strings-led Gothic number. 

The track is our first preview of Charli’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack album, written to accompany Emerald Fennell’s much-anticipated film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel. 

Explaining more about how the collaboration came about, Charli has shared: “I got a call from Emerald Fennell last Christmas asking whether I would consider working on a song for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. I read the script and immediately felt inspired, so 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.” 

Of working with John Cale, Charli has also noted how she was particularly inspired by his philosophy that any Velvet Underground song “had to be both ‘elegant and brutal’.” Continuing, she says: “I got really stuck on that phrase. I write it down on my notes app and would pull it up from time to time and think about what he meant.

“When working on music for this film, ‘elegant and brutal’ was a phrase I kept coming back to. 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. Something that only John could do. And it was… well, it made my cry.” 

Watch the Mitch Ryan-directed video for ‘House’ below.