The Story Behind Charli xcx’s Gothic New Wuthering Heights Music Video

Yesterday evening, Charli xcx released Chains of Love, the second single from her forthcoming album Wuthering Heights, the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s highly anticipated film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. A feverish new music video arrives with the song, directed and choreographed by C Prinz. Chains of Love follows the album’s first single, House, released last week alongside a haunting music video from Mitch Ryan which set the gothic, brooding tone of the film’s visual and sonic world ahead of its release in February 2026.

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C Prinz says Charli approached this project with an “innate feral energy” that subsequently shaped the video’s entire visual language. “There’s this rawness to Charli’s world-building that I’ve always admired,” C Prinz tells AnOther. “She takes pop music and mixes it with the deeply profound layers of existing today, distilling them into something evocative and real.”

The pair’s creative relationship began long before Wuthering Heights. C Prinz remembers driving around Los Angeles in her “beat-up ‘01 Honda,” listening to Charli’s 2017 song Tears on repeat. “I was going through my first LA heartbreak. Probably sobbing,” she recalls. “The track was so devastatingly romantic. It’s still one of my favourites.” They later met while C Prinz was working with Caroline Polachek on her Pang tour, which Charli sang on. “It was the first live show we did post-Covid and the energy was beyond electric.”

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Since then, C Prinz has directed the movement behind some of Charli’s most iconic moments, from the laid back choreography of 360 to the sweat-slick intensity of the Brat World Tour. “Movement directing with Charli is like being inside a voltage field – her performance just radiates,” she explains. The Brat tour, she adds, was built around movement that appeared “accidental, instinctive, born in the moment,” styled to look like “the club: sweaty, impulsive … a rollercoaster of emotions.”

The concept for Chains of Love began with a single image: “Charli lying face down on a banquet table like a deity in a baroque fever dream – half muse, half monster.” What followed was an exploration of “desire in captivity,” a gothic ritual in which Charli isn’t playing a character but embodying a force. “She’s magnetic, destructive, erotic, divine,” C Prinz says. “I built the video around the idea of her body being pushed between possession and proclamation, as if the space itself is in love with her and can’t decide whether to worship her or destroy her.”

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For the director, the project aligns intuitively with the emotional volatility of Emily Brontë’s novel, which she describes as “a study of obsession, self-ruin, and psychic weather.” With Chains of Love, the pair channel that tempest into something ferocious, decadent and unbound. The result is a music video that feels period drunk and yet totally contemporary. “It became a kind of gothic performance ritual – devotion turning to hysteria, beauty collapsing into transcendence, all inside one surreal, decadent tableau.” Brat summer is over – cue goth winter.