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This past Valentine’s Day weekend, a common sight in the usual places where hand-holding pairs wander on afternoon dates broke the mold for conventional coupling: groups of young women celebrating the holiday in the spirit of both romance and friendship. They entered theaters bearing popcorn and tissues, ready for a group cry to Emerald Fennell’s florid cinematic update of Emily Brontë’s foundational anti-romance, Wuthering Heights. And in the romance-oriented bookstores increasingly popping up across America, they shopped together for spicy novels about hockey players coming to terms with their mutual attraction or dragon riders stealing kisses while saving their kingdoms. Someone running across a phalanx of these self-professed “book nerds” wouldn’t be wrong to sense a connection to 21st century pop music fandoms, the social networks supporting artists like Taylor Swift or Charli xcx. Bookstores with names like Slow Burn or Lovestruck sell bookmarks or other trinkets emblazoned with Swift lyrics alongside those with quotes from leading romantasy author Sarah J. Maas. One I recently visited in Nashville had heartthrob-themed votive candles for sale on the counter, featuring Wuthering Heights star Jacob Elordi, perennial internet’s boyfriend Pedro Pascal — and Bad Bunny. Pop icons can serve as ideal Male Main Characters alongside the usual movie stars.
Fennell understands how this decade’s resurgence of interest in literary love stories is connected to the phenomenon of music fans forming robust communities. Most pop hits are love stories, after all, and in the minds of romance readers, music plays behind each climactic kiss. In Wuthering Heights, with its Harlequin-cover imagery and a contemporary take on Brontë’s twisted, infernal view of erotic desire that turns it into 50 Shades of Victorian Fog, Fennell creates a setting that’s as much about today’s fashions and pop references as it is about the muck and intrigue of Brontë’s time. Doing so connects this Wuthering Heights with the bibliophile demographic that’s inseparably intertwined with the Swifties and Angels and other robust pop affinity groups that have redefined 21st century consumer culture. She even commissioned Charli xcx to write songs for the film, a challenge the inventor of Brat Summer eagerly accepted as a way to step aside from her club and drug era and into something more redolent of history and high art. Having closed the door on pop stardom temporarily with her pseudo-documentary film The Moment, the always experimental diva declared herself inspired by Velvet Underground violist and general art god John Cale‘s description of his legendary former band’s music as “elegant and brutal,” a blend she hoped for on this new project. Her collaboration with Cale, the tone poem “House,” emulates Cale’s way of blending classical tropes with Leonard Cohen-like rock balladry. Its use in the grisly-sexy opening scene of Wuthering Heights sets the film’s mood as pure pop — grounded in pastiche and anachronisms, unconcerned with formal or historical accuracy, dedicated to bringing its story into the present moment.
The album Wuthering Heights is a circuitous journey, really a series of approaches to the inner world of Catherine Earnshaw, an anti-heroine whom Charli clearly finds sympathetic if sometimes also pathetic. Fitting its role as both part of and companion to the film (all three singles from the album get screen time, though folk songs and a deliberately sentimental score by Fennell’s longtime collaborator Anthony Willis more openly advance the plot), it alternates fully formed singles with short set pieces that sonically answer the lushly creepy imagery Fennell favors. There is one banger, the Eurodisco redux “Dying For You,” which taps the dopamine vein in romantic suffering. The strings-driven pop of “Seeing Things” suggests what Charli’s former friend Taylor Swift might have done with this story, but most of the album is far murkier and more fatalistic than anything that usually makes today’s pop charts. It’s closer to Charli’s own formative hyperpop forays, and to the post-punk experiments that leaked into the mainstream back when Kate Bush, music’s eternally unrivaled Brontë interpreter, wrote her 1978 breakthrough fantasia named after the novel.
While nothing on Charli’s album reaches the great Kate’s apex of enthrallment and abandon, she does connect with the spirit of those days when new wave was new and arty girls and boys were making grand gestures, from Pat Benatar’s rock to the maudlin lyricism of synth-driven bands like Talk Talk. On the impeccable playlist that Charli assembled for Spotify with help from Fennell, dream pop originators Cocteau Twins sit next to David Lynch soundtracker Julee Cruise, original abject rocker Iggy Pop, cloud rapper Yung Lean and costume punks Shakespears Sister. The playlist’s motivation resembles that of Charli’s original music, and Fennell’s film: to yank the gothic out of any one period, be it the 19th century or the 1980s, and follow its dim light through all kinds of sonic passages.
While sticklers for historical accuracy have found much to criticize in Wuthering Heights — despite the stylized scare quotes reinforcing Fennell’s insistence that her Heathcliff and Cathy are constructed from her own reference points alone, debate has raged about everything from Heathcliff’s racial identity to whether this is a love story at all — it is, in fact, tailor-made for the blissfully recombinant world of current romance reading. Enter a bookstore with a spicy focus and you’ll discover myriad variations on what the critic Shawna Lipton called “the bodice-ripper rebrand,” from updates on all-American faves like cowboys and quarterbacks to “dark romance” set in libraries and castles, sci-fi crossovers, and explicit quests to figure out the anatomy of sex with monsters, fairies or werewolves. Music occasionally becomes the subject of these novels, with aspiring songwriters and bad-boy rockstars serving as main characters. But whether it’s a plot point or not, choosing music to read by and to flesh out further dreams about their favorite characters is a major aspect of romance readers’ leisure time.
While I waited for the release of Wuthering Heights, I grew curious about the intersection of reading and listening to music at a time when high romance has taken over far more than Emerald Fennell’s fancy. I cast my net for other playlists and discussions about music to read by. I found much more than I expected — and frankly, I expected a lot. While my own taste in genre fiction runs more to murder than romance or fantasy, I’m fascinated by the burgeoning subcultures keeping bookstores — and, arguably, publishing — alive through their avid pursuit of all things wild, dark and spicy. What I’ve learned in my limited research is that these intersecting communities of readers do much more to celebrate their affinities than drop reviews on Goodreads; for many, reading is the heart of a sparkling creative lifestyle. And music is a big part of the cozy bibliophile’s world.
Besides Charli’s official playlist, for example, dozens of user-generated Wuthering Heights playlists appear across streaming services, most of which predate the existence of Fennell’s film. Dozens more surface in a simple search for “reading” and “romance,” with titles like “Booktok songs that destroy me,” “POV: a vampire is in love with you” and “reading cute romance books at 1 a.m.” A whole subset of playlists is designed to soundtrack specific books or series. Attached to this playlist-making surge is the use of music on #BookTok, where certain songs and artists become deeply linked with the novels and series fans celebrate. Some musicians are learning to take advantage of this connection: the Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy, for example, is often cited on Reddit as a bibliophile favorite, and maintains an Instagram “book club” where fans can see what he’s got on his own bookshelf. Literary websites also often make playlists devoted to a particular genre or author, some historically accurate (Jane Austen playlists abound, focusing on the music of Regency England) while others are more like fan lists — which, like Charli’s album, range freely throughout genres and periods.
Among lovers of contemporary genre fiction, certain musical styles have gained favor. Progressive metal, for example, syncs up well for readers of stories about fairies and dragons. A Reddit thread tagged “Sleep Token + Romantasy = Perfection” has readers matching songs by that popular if critically unloved band to various MMC’s, or male main characters. Some participants in the thread went so far as to connect specific scenes with passages in Sleep Token songs, and vice versa. “I literally just requested a book rec where the relationship feels like 4:15 to 5:20 of ‘Emergence,’ ” one fan wrote, citing a particularly bombastic, drum-driven climax. Other frequently cited metal and adjacent bands include the Deftones and the symphonic Nightwish.
The metalheads I know are uniformly bookish, so this alignment doesn’t surprise me — but if I’m being honest, nods go far more frequently to balladeers who fit the MMC mold, like Kennedy, Alex Warren and the lord of them all, Hozier. Playlists vary by genre according to who’s reading. Adjacent to romance are sci-fi authors like Nnedi Okorafor, whose followers bring an Afrofuturist sensibility to their playlisting, favoriting techno-savvy musicians like Sudan Archives. My NPR Music colleague Nikki Birch is a major fantasy fan, and she polled her friend group of BIPOC romance and fantasy fans for their picks. They listed a lot of classic R&B — Sade, Maxwell, Luther, Janet — alongside some jazz and contemporary classical artists like Tony Ann. There’s definitely a subset of bibliophiles who prefer instrumental music to read by, and a cohort of classical-lite composers and instrumentalists like Ann, Joel Sunny, Kelsey Woods and Taylor Ash have found success connecting with these listeners. Ash even has a lush, synth-driven song called “A Court of Thorns and Roses.”
Most often, readers sharing music through playlists and forums cite women as their musical inspiration. Florence Welch deserves special mention, not only because her Pre-Raphaelite persona predated the romantasy craze and probably helped feed it, but because she has written songs inspired by the works of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro. (Florence’s fans made a book club in her honor, Between Two Books, focusing on her favorites but eventually expanding to include an array of contributors.) In the past year, a new rival has emerged for Florence’s crown among book lovers: Paris Paloma, whose fans attend her concerts wearing hodgepodge period garb and dance in “fairy rings” after each show. Paloma’s 2023 song “Labour” swept across social platforms as a rallying cry for Gen Z women discovering, and enraged by, the double standard of work in many heterosexual relationships. As Paloma put it, “All day, every day, therapist, mother, maid / Nymph, then a virgin, nurse, then a servant.”
Last year, Paloma released a short film celebrating her fans; as images of shouting, smiling young women turned toward each other fill the screen, the songwriter intones, “At every single show, every night, I’m reminded of the power we have in our community and solidarity with each other.” This feminist pronouncement recalls the way romance readers talk about their bonds. As with many pop worlds, this one does break down into identity clusters — most of Paloma’s fans are white, as is the public face of the cozy bibliophile craze. BIPOC writers and readers of romance and fantasy are claiming space in bookstores and online, however, and, as I noted above, making their own playlists. One interesting subset of musicians who frequently appear on romance readers’ lists consists of Black and brown artists whose music defies easy categorization. FKA twigs, Spellling and Doechii, all artists who entertain the fabulous within their music, show up on many playlists.
The most recent artist to enter this space is Hemlocke Springs — the performing alter ego of Isimeme “Naomi” Udu — whose rococo dance-pop has won a strong fanbase among bibliophiles. Her just-released debut album the apple tree under the sea includes “sever the blight,” a truly gothic account of erotic thrall that, unlike most attempts to glom on to her glory, captures the nervous magic of Kate Bush. With a Game of Thrones-meets-Guy Maddin video that fully locates its story in a non-white universe, recalling Doechii’s fever dreams, and lyrics that infuse the gothic with intersectional awareness (“You see, I’m not Snow White / The fairest of our land,” Udu sings, Heathcliffing it up), “sever the blight” takes pop romantasy in a promising new direction.
As Emerald Fennell certainly understands, romance novels restage women’s fight for independence within environments far more exciting than the offices and apartments where readers might be living through similar power dynamics. The theatrical pop songs of artists like Paris Paloma and Hemlocke Springs do the same, adding a supernatural kick to the often frustrating struggles of women’s daily lives. Emily Brontë showed her genius for confronting the tangle of gender, class and racial hierarchies within a classic ghost story when she wrote Wuthering Heights; no matter how campy or sexy or pastiche-y a contemporary reinterpreter renders her tale, that mess, which we as humans are perennially trying and failing to clean up, lies at the heart of it.
Romance novels both acknowledge this human predicament and allow for some escape from it. Fantasy takes readers to another plane. Wuthering Heights, as an historical text with supernatural elements, addresses real inequities and oppression within a heightened framework. The dislocated music Charli xcx brings to Fennell’s version of the tale further destabilizes a story that has rattled readers for two centuries. But even in a far more comprehensible romance, the sensory immediacy of music can evoke and intensify an emotional shift in ways that up the stakes both within a story and beyond it. Bibliophiles creating needle drops to soundtrack their reading experiences subtly change the meanings of both the books and the songs they bring together.
This can happen in other media, too: Just consider Heated Rivalry, the homoerotic hockey drama that was also pulled from the bookshelf, and which has become streaming culture’s latest major thirst trap. That show’s revival of the 20-year-old Wolf Parade song “I’ll Believe in Anything” is a perfect instance of a needle drop enhancing high romance; playing behind a cathartic embrace that changes its main characters’ lives, the song conveys the queasy interplay of urgency and fear that Charli xcx captures differently in her Wuthering Heights songs. “Give me your eyes, I need sunshine,” sings Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug, “your blood, your bones, your voice and your ghost.” What was it that Heathcliff said? “Haunt me, then!” Call it love or desperation — desire can feel this way. Like a chorus that doesn’t fade.
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