Charli XCX – Always Everywhere

From the album Wuthering Heights and the film “Wuthering Heights”… 

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[7.14]Andrew Karpan: I admittedly have yet to quite venture into the intense, blundering feelings of the next Emerald Fennell Joint, but I can recognize, with some foggy studiousness, the faint crushed glassware of those old Easyfun records, just like I can remember the summer of my sophomore year, those endless months that feel so ornate and permanent now. One imagines Charli trying to chisel herself into that luminous history too.
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Alfred Soto: Emily Brontë’s insane novel about an undying love between two monstrous people inspires Charli to write commensurate melodies and lyrics. The played and synthesized strings on “Always Everywhere” that rise like mephitic fumes from the moors accompany sentiments like “On the water, your face on top of mine/a fever dream of mirrored features, hungry eyes.”
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Julian Axelrod: Perfectly functional montage ballad, but probably the fifth or sixth song I would pick as a single from Wuthering Heights. If nothing else, this proves Charli has enough juice post-Brat to push a yearning non-banger in the vein of “I might say something stupid” to… well, not the top of the charts, but the mid-tier of Gay Guy Music Video Night.
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Claire Davidson: I really hate that “Chains of Love” got caught in our 2025 end-of-year shuffle, because not only is it far and away the best song Charli XCX wrote for the Wuthering Heights soundtrack, its high-octane collision of baroque poise and Charli’s signature metallic synth textures demonstrates just how much of the remaining album feels scattershot by comparison. “Always Everywhere” at least features a more developed idea than Charli merely warbling through tortured-love metaphors, leaning into the gothic scale of her sadness and letting her string arrangements do most of the talking. Love her though I do, though, Charli XCX is no Kate Bush, and her blasé vocal timbre doesn’t really pair well with the understated melancholy of her verses, even before she embellishes this approach with the sort of booming multitracking that feels more appropriate for the club than the moors. Her more wistful performance does pay dividends on the hook, where the song’s more ornate instrumentation bursts with a combination of creaking cellos, piercing violins, and sawing viola melodies that all but embodies the sensation of a heart literally breaking in half — a depiction of longing for a lover that, beyond all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Emerald Fennell’s attendant film, really does capture that bittersweet divide.
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Nortey Dowuona: Charli and Finn Keane to Justin Raisen and Lewis Pesacov.
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Leah Isobel: On paper I am a mark for this: Super Ultra and True Romance‘s synesthetic illustrations of world-ending love and despair basically formed my entire 20s, I have been known to absolutely demolish a karaoke rendition of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” I did theatre for like ten years. But I dunno, I’m sort of unmoved by this. At her best, I think Charli can mediate the demands of good taste (as her audience expects her to) with melodic or lyrical or instrumental twists that bring unexpected personality; like, her “Welcome to my Island” remix is the canonical one because she turns it into a song with a perspective. This is quite pretty, but it feels way too respectable from the artist who once made this.
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Scott Mildenhall: This understandably feels more like a trailer than a single, but it serves that purpose well. Emotion pervades in fragments, disquieting the still. It’s a reminder above all of True Romance; a quieter take on Charli’s most compelling mode.
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