February 14, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, as the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights hits screens, with a soundtrack by Charli XCX, our critic discovers rich territory where film, literature and music take on themes of gothic romance.

Paul Kooiker

Hello to the haunted and the haunters,

The skies are finally blue in Nashville now that the disastrous weather that paralyzed the city a couple of weeks ago has passed. But I’m planning a stormy, spooky Valentine’s Day — a date with my darlings (husband and daughter) to go see the new Emerald Fennell provocation, Wuthering Heights. Or — “Wuthering Heights” — with the quotes the director inserted to remind us that this is one in a long line of inevitably partial attempts to contain the maelstrom that is Emily Brontë’s gothic masterpiece.

Fennell’s movie — by her own account the version she cast in her head when she was 14 — was dismissed by many before its trailer even came out because white Australian dreamboat Jacob Elordi plays Heathcliff, the “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect” whom, many scholars agree, makes this transgressive novel an interracial romance. Beyond that serious critique (my contribution: Period drama king Dev Patel was RIGHT THERE), the film has been derided because many cinephiles simply dislike Fennell’s over-the-topness, the vulgarity and hedonistic lushness that makes her this century’s Ken Russell.

I myself enjoy the occasional absolutely bonkers flick that abandons any kind of propriety in favor of cinematic “assault,” to use a term Russell favored: Itallian giallo horror, exercises in discomfort from current gross-art darling Yorgos Lanthimos, Fennell’s previous scorned hit Saltburn. I expect something similar from “Wuthering Heights.” Grab me by the hem, Emerald, and carry me to those wily, windy moors!

I’m also feeling good about Fennell commissioning Charli XCX to write a set of songs for the film, though I’ve heard some Brontëheads express concern about the impingement of “house music” on the story’s Victorian vibes. It’s clear that Charli welcomed this project as a chance to confront some ghosts of her own, returning to the murkier emotions she explored on the peak COVID-era album how i’m feeling now. In recent interviews, Charli has said that after her endless Brat summer she’d decompressed by listening to a lot of the Velvet Underground and, in fact, enlisted John Cale, that legendary band’s violist and an art-rock god in his own right, for her first Wuthering Heights release, the tone poem “House,” which recalls the blend of classical and avant-rock influences on works like his 1982 nervous breakdown album Music For a New Society.

The album Wuthering Heights (note: Charli eschews quotes, showing a greater commitment to channeling the source, perhaps) came out at midnight yesterday, giving me the chance for a cursory listen. My snap judgment is that it will reward many returns. It’s a circuitous journey, or really a series of approaches to the inner world of Catherine Earnshaw, an anti-heroine Charli clearly finds sympathetic if sometimes also pathetic. There is one banger, the Eurodisco redux “Dying For You,” which taps the dopamine vein in romantic suffering. The strings-driven pop of “Seeing Things” suggests what Charli’s former friend Taylor Swift might have done with this story, but most of the album is far murkier and more fatalistic than anything that usually makes today’s pop charts. It’s closer to what leaked into the mainstream back when Kate Bush, music’s eternally unrivaled Brontë interpreter, wrote her 1978 breakthrough song named after the novel. While nothing on Charli’s album reaches the great Kate’s apex of enthrallment and abandon, she does connect with the spirit of those days when New Wave was new and arty girls and boys were making grand gestures, from Pat Benatar’s rock to the maudlin lyricism of synth-driven bands like Talk Talk.

On the impeccable playlist that Charli assembled for Spotify (with help from Fennell), dream pop originators the Cocteau Twins sit next to David Lynch soundtracker Julee Cruise, original abject rocker Iggy Pop, cloud rapper Yung Lean and costume punks Shakespears Sister. The motivation seems to be to yank the gothic out of any one period, be it the 19th century or the 1980s, following its dim light through all kinds of sonic passages.

I may write more about Charli’s literary turn in the future, but I must tell you — there’s a whole world beyond this one literary pop effort. While I waited for the release of Wuthering Heights, I grew curious about the intersection of reading and listening to music at a time when high romance has taken over far more than Emerald Fennell’s fancy, so I cast my net for other playlists and discussions about music to read by. I found much more than I expected — and frankly, I expected a lot. While my own taste in genre fiction runs more to murder than romance or fantasy, I’m fascinated by the burgeoning subcultures keeping bookstores — and, arguably, publishing — alive through their avid pursuit of all things wild, dark and spicy. What I’ve learned in my limited research is that these intersecting communities of readers do much more to celebrate their affinities than drop reviews on Goodreads; for many, reading is the heart of a sparkling creative lifestyle. And music is a big part of the cozy bibliophile’s world.

Besides Charli’s official playlist, for example, there are at least two dozen user-generated playlists on Spotify bearing the name “Wuthering Heights,” most of which predate the existence of Fennell’s film. Dozens more appear when I search “reading” and “romance,” with variations including “gothic romance aesthetics,” “reading a sports romance” and “cozy romance manga,” not to mention playlists dedicated to book series like H.D. Carlton’s Cat and Mouse Duet or the ubiquitous A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.

Attached to this playlist-making surge is the use of music on #booktok, where certain songs and artists become deeply linked with the novels and series fans celebrate. Some musicians are learning to take advantage of this connection: The Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, for example, is often cited on Reddit as a bibliophiles’ favorite, and maintains an Instagram “book club” where fans can see what he’s got on his own bookshelf. Literary websites also often make playlists devoted to a particular genre or author, some historically accurate (Jane Austen playlists abound, focusing on the music of Regency England) while others are more like fan lists — which, like Charli’s playlist, range freely throughout genres and periods.

Among lovers of contemporary genre fiction, certain musical styles have gained favor. Progressive metal, for example, syncs up well for readers of stories about fairies and dragons. A Reddit thread tagged “Sleep Token + Romantasy = Perfection” has readers matching songs by that popular if critically unloved band to various MMC’s, or male main characters. Some participants in the thread went so far as to connect specific scenes with passages in Sleep Token songs, and vice versa. “I literally just requested a book rec where the relationship feels like 4:15 to 5:20 of ‘Emergence,’” one fan wrote, referencing a particularly bombastic, drum-driven climax. Other frequently cited metal and adjacent bands include the Deftones and the symphonic Nightwish.

The metalheads I know are uniformly bookish, so this alignment doesn’t surprise me — but if I’m being honest, nods go far more frequently to balladeers who fit the MMC mold, like Kennedy, Alex Warren and the lord of them all, Hozier. Playlists vary by genre according to who’s reading. Adjacent to romance are sci-fi authors like Nnedi Okorofor, whose followers bring an Afro-Futurist sensibility to their playlisting, favoring techno-savvy musicians like Sudan Archives. A colleague polled her friend group of romance and fantasy fans for their picks, and they listed a lot of classic R&B — Sade, Maxwell, Luther, Janet — alongside some jazz and contemporary classical artists like Tony Ann. There’s definitely a subset of bibliophiles who prefer instrumental music to read by, and a cohort of classical-lite composers and instrumentalists like Ann, Joel Sunny, Kesley Woods and Taylor Ash have found success connecting with these listeners. Ash even has a lush, synth-driven song called “A Court of Thorns and Roses.”

Most often, readers sharing music through playlists and forums cite women as their musical inspiration. Florence Welch deserves special mention, not only because her Pre-Raphaelite persona predated the romantasy craze and probably helped define it, but because she has written songs inspired by the works of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro. (Florence’s fans made a book club in her honor, Between Two Books, focusing on her favorites but eventually expanding to include an array of contributors.) In the past year, a new rival has emerged for Florence’s crown among book lovers — Paris Paloma, whose fans attend her concerts wearing hodgepodge period garb and dance in “fairy rings” after each show. Paloma’s 2023 song “Labour” swept across social platforms as a rallying cry for Gen Z women discovering, and enraged by, the double standard of work in many heterosexual relationships. As Paloma put it, “All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant.”

The feminine critique embedded in both romantasy and theatrical rock like Paloma’s is most often staged by white women; while BIPOC writers of romance and fantasy do fill shelves in every bookstore, and artists like FKA twigs bring the aesthetic to the dance floor, these realms remain white-dominated. One musical exception is Hemlocke Springs — the performing alter ego of Isimeme “Naomi” Udu — whose rococo dance-pop has won a strong fanbase among bibliophiles. Her just-released debut album the apple tree under the sea included “sever the blight,” a grim fantasia of erotic thrall that, unlike most attempts to glom on to her glory, truly captures the nervous magic of Kate Bush. With a Game of Thrones-meets-Guy Maddin video that fully locates its story in a non-white universe, recalling Doechii’s fever dreams, and lyrics that infuse the gothic with intersectional awareness (“you see, I’m not Snow White / the fairest of our land,” Udu sings, Heathcliffing it up), “sever the blight” takes pop romantasy in a promising new direction.

As Emerald Fennell certainly understands, romance novels restage women’s fight for independence within environments far more exciting than the offices and apartments where readers might be living through similar power dynamics. The theatrical pop songs of artists like Paris Paloma and Hemlocke Springs do the same, adding a supernatural kick to the often frustrating struggles of women’s daily lives. Emily Brontë showed her genius for confronting the tangle of gender, class and racial hierarchies within a classic ghost story when she wrote Wuthering Heights; no matter how campy or sexy or pastiche-y a contemporary reinterpreter renders her tale, that mess, which we as humans are perennially trying and failing to clean up, lays at the heart of it.

Romance novels both acknowledge this human predicament and allow for some escape from it. Fantasy takes readers to another plane. Wuthering Heights, as an historical text with supernatural elements, addresses real inequities and oppression within a heightened framework. The dislocated music Charli XCX brings to Fennell’s version of the tale further destabilizes a story that has rattled readers for two centuries. But even in a far more comprehensible romance, the sensory immediacy of music can evoke and intensify an emotional shift in ways that up the stakes both within a story and beyond it. Bibliophiles creating needle drops to soundtrack their reading experiences subtly change the meanings of both the books and the songs they bring together.

This can happen in other media, too: Just consider Heated Rivalry, the homoerotic hockey drama that was also pulled from the bookshelf, and which has become streaming culture’s latest major thirst trap. That show’s revival of the 20-year-old Wolf Parade song “I’ll Believe in Anything” is a perfect instance of a needle drop enhancing high romance; playing behind a cathartic embrace that changes its main characters’ lives, the song conveys the queasy interplay of urgency and fear that Charli XCX captures differently in her Wuthering Heights songs. “Give me your eyes, I need sunshine,” sings Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, “your blood, your bones, your voice and your ghost.” What was it that Heathcliff said? “Haunt me, then!” Call it love or desperation — desire can feel this way. Like a chorus that doesn’t fade.

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February 14, 2026

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Here are a few things making my heart throb this week

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