Charli XCX teams up with John Cale on an extraordinary spoken-word collaboration between two musicians born half a century apart.

If you sat down to make a list of likely collaborators with Charli XCX, the queen of dance-pop, your finger would go a long way down before you came to 83-year-old avant-garde legend John Cale.

Fifty years her senior, Cale has been confounding expectations even before he began playing his viola with The Velvet Underground; and he hasn’t let up since then. 

The Welshman has never had a hit single but that may well change with this creepy dirge, recorded with the chart-friendly Charli for the soundtrack of Emerald Fennell’s already-controversial remake of Wuthering Heights.

And I mean “dirge” in a good way – very good indeed – for a collaboration with shades of the Velvets’ sinister spoken-word epic The Gift, and the dissonant elements of The Black Angel’s Death Song and Sister Ray, in House.

A far, far cry from the electro-pop of Brat, it’s a slow, sinister spoken-word monologue (by Cale) set to an ominous background of squeaking viola strings and dark, disturbing industrial drones. 

It’s a long time before Charli herself joins Cale on the macabre chorus – “I think I’m going to die in this house” – followed by a blood-curdling scream that melts into a maelstrom of distortion, feedback and echoing beats. 

It’s extraordinary, perfectly channelling what Charli describes as the “elegant and brutal” sound of the Velvets, and so is the complementary Victorian-gothic video set in a forest at night.

It’s also the unlikeliest of hit singles but with Charli XCX you know it’s going to hit the heights (wuthering or otherwise).