Charli xcx felt “stuck” and “empty” creatively after she released Brat.
The Apple singer has admitted she was left “depleted” and couldn’t even bear to listen to music, let alone write anything inspiring, as it would leave her “feeling depressed”.
In a candid admission, she told fans on her new Substack account: “I still love [Brat], 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. I couldn’t really even listen to music without feeling depressed. Everything felt monotonous and boring, even if it wasn’t.”
Charli’s Brat album was phenomenally successful—winning a slew of Grammy and BRIT Awards and entering the public consciousness through the Brat Summer trend—but she feared it would get her “dropped” by her record label.
Speaking to Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop podcast recently, she said: “I actually made this record being like, ‘OK, I’m just going to do this one for me. Maybe I’m going to get dropped by my label, and that’s fine.’ That was kind of the headspace that I was in.”
Charli, however, was “immediately” inspired to begin making music for the forthcoming Wuthering Heights film.
She wrote on social media: “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.”
This week, Charli released the first track from the soundtrack, House, which features John Cale from The Velvet Underground, whom she is a massive fan of.