House (Charli XCX song)

Did You Know?

• Following its release, 'House' quickly became associated with a TikTok trend consisting of users sharing unsettling situations.
• The trend is commonly searched for as 'I think I'm gonna die in this house trend' due to that part of the song playing in the videos.

Background and composition

In December 2024, director Emerald Fennell asked Charli XCX to contribute a song for her film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Charli began work on the soundtrack after being inspired by Todd Haynes’s 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground, specifically John Cale’s remark that the band’s sound needed to be both “elegant and brutal.” She wrote the first version of “House” with producer Finn Keane while on tour in Austin, then invited Cale to collaborate. He contributed a spoken word poem that Charli said “made me cry” and was “something that only John could do.” The track blends lush gothic orchestral arrangements with industrial rock, featuring noisy, distorted instrumentation that has drawn comparisons to Nine Inch Nails. Critics have labeled the song as spoken word, neoclassical darkwave, gothic rock, and industrial rock. Cale later appeared on the cover of Charli’s 2026 album Music, Fashion, Film alongside Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese.