Charli XCX is, more than anything, a lover of art at its most cultish and subversive. It makes sense that she made a concept album built around J.G. Ballard’s wonderfully transgressive novel Crash, and that she loves The Velvet Underground, the band Cale co-founded in 1964. Their cult appeal was in their ability to push rock into its most abrasive extremes, and to be completely dismissive of almost every other band while doing it.

On ‘House’, though, Charli does more than just fulfil a musical fantasy. She pushes herself into wildly uncharted territory, pairing her pitch-shifted vocals with eye-watering walls of distortion. The result is something dark, charnel, and firmly of the moors; something of the ferocity of Brontë’s book is packed into this 3-minute searing of sound.

Cale is also cut straight from a moor. He seems adrift, confused, almost Lear-like. In his now gravelly voice, he delivers lines like “I’m a prisoner / To live for eternity / I was thinking, 'what is this place?’ / I thought it would be perfect.” He is at his most cold and cutting, but still shows an instinct for slicing up lyrics into tantalising fragments. It is as if he has taken passages of Wuthering Heights and folded them back, but out of order. Behind him, an unsettling string section creaks, evoking the bereft, broken place of the book still more.

Only in the second half of the song does Charli’s contribution come, and with it, a howling, distorted guitar. Her voice finds an uneasy union with Cale’s, and amongst the walls of noise, they find a brilliant new middle-ground. This is not just collaboration for collaboration’s sake, but two visionary artists, at very different stages of their careers, making something genuinely thrilling.

Alex Bentley

a.j.bentley

Image: ‘House’ Official Single Cover