In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë never romanticizes love — she exposes it as a primal, almost violent force that shapes, destroys, and condemns. And Chains of Love, which was written directly to Emerald Fennel‘s film, translates precisely this incendiary dimension of the bond between Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a connection that was never gentle but inevitable; never tender but absolute.

The song uses physical pain to express emotional agony — “I’d rather lay down in thorns / I’d rather drown in a stream / I’d rather light myself on fire” and this could easily be Heathcliff himself confessing the impossibility of existing without Cathy. He would rather endure any bodily pain than face the void of her absence. As he says in Brontë’s novel: “I cannot live without my life, I cannot live without my soul.” The song, in its own way, echoes the same wound.

The suffocating imagery —“My face is turning blue / Can’t breathe without you here” —
perfectly captures the cold fire that burns both protagonists. Cathy, too, knows this suffocation: by choosing Edgar Linton, she severs herself from the only place where she truly breathed. The irony is cruel: she dies suffocated by her own choices, and Heathcliff spends his entire life suffocated by the absence of her soul.

It can also be read as the literal moment of Cathy and Heathcliff’s deaths. However, since Heathcliff’s death won’t appear in the film if it focuses only on the first part of the story — as it seems to be the case — this moment belongs to Cathy, dying precisely because she cannot be with the one she loves. Sorry for the spoiler!

When the lyrics say: “The chains of love are cruel / I shouldn’t feel like a prisoner”
it is impossible not to think of the emotional determinism that dominates Brontë’s story. Cathy and Heathcliff are not simply lovers; they are captives of each other. Chained since childhood, they confuse freedom with destruction, passion with possession. For them, love was never shelter — it was prison, storm, and fate.

Perhaps the most Brontë-esque line is: “No matter how hard I try / I’m here so permanently”
because no one escapes Wuthering Heights — neither living nor dead. Their love exists beyond body, time, and reason. Brontë never frees them because they do not know how to exist apart.

“I know the chains of love won’t break” feels like an unwritten epilogue to the novel:
The eternal lament of two ghosts wandering the moors because their love did not die, not even with death.

Comparing It to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”

If Chains of Love expresses the internal, feverish, self-destructive dimension of Cathy and Heathcliff’s bond, Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights expresses its spectral, mythic, supernatural dimension — two sides of the same emotional storm.

Where Chains of Love is the breathless cry of a love that suffocates, Kate Bush sings from the perspective of Cathy’s ghost, already freed from her body, yet still chained to the world she left behind. “Let me in at your window” is the plea of someone who died but could not move on. It echoes the same voice that, in Chains of Love, says, “I can’t breathe without you here.” In Bush’s version, Cathy no longer breathes — yet she still knocks at the window, because Heathcliff is the air she never had in life.

Both songs rely on images of pain and transcendence. In Chains of Love, the speaker accepts thorns, fire, blood — a living martyrdom. In Wuthering Heights, agony becomes ghostliness, a lament dissolving into the wind: “It’s me, Cathy, come home. I’m so cold.” The cold that, in Chains of Love, suffocates (“my face is turning blue”) in Bush becomes literally the chill of Cathy wandering the moor after death.

They meet again in Brontë’s central theme: love that will not break. In Bush, this is the endless return of Cathy, unable to accept separation. In Chains of Love: “I know the chains of love won’t break.”

The two songs are sisters — not because they’re about romantic love, but because they’re about fatal love. Kate Bush elevates the gothic, supernatural myth. Charli XCX dives into the visceral, contemporary wound.

One is wind. The other is flesh. And both are Emily Brontë — translated into sound.

Who Is Charli XCX — and Why It Matters That She Wrote the Original Song for Emerald Fennell’s Film

Bringing Charli XCX into this lineage is not just contemporary — it is symbolically powerful.

Charli is one of the most influential pop artists of her generation, a figure who exists between mainstream and experimental, reshaping hyperpop into an emotional, visceral, futuristic language. Her work mixes vulnerability and ferocity, softness and distortion. She is, in the 2020s, what Kate Bush was in the late 1970s: a woman expanding what pop music can be. Charli XCX does not imitate — she reinvents.

And this is why Emerald Fennell chose her for an original Wuthering Heights soundtrack that feels so right. Just as Kate Bush once reimagined Cathy in her own singular, spectral language, Charli now steps forward to reinterpret the novel’s emotional core through the lens of 21st-century pop.

Kate Bush opened the door for women to transform gothic literature into pop mythology.
Charli XCX walks through that door and pushes it further open.

If Kate turned Cathy into a ghostly presence, Charli turns her into a living wound — a perfect match for Fennell’s sensual, psychological, destabilizing adaptation.

By signing the original song for the new Wuthering Heights, Charli XCX joins a lineage of women who transformed pain into art:

• Emily Brontë, who wrote The Anatomy of Destructive Passion.
• Kate Bush, who mythologized that passion in music.
• Charli XCX, who now reimagines that same fire in the modern emotional language of electronic pop.

She is not merely illustrating the film; she is dialoguing with nearly 200 years of female creativity built on desire, agony, and transcendence.

And “Chains of Love” embodies this: a visceral dive into the inability to break a love that suffocates — echoing Brontë, conversing with Bush, and finding its own fierce, contemporary form.