When the boundary-breaking architect of hyper-pop, Charli XCX, and the Velvet Underground legend John Cale are locked inside the same room, what emerges is far more than a “song”: it is a situation, a crisis of reality, a claustrophobic manifesto.
When Charli’s razor-sharp electronic aesthetic collides with Cale’s avant-garde darkness, “House” turns into something resembling a stream-of-consciousness monologue.
There are no pop melodies here; instead, there is the sound of a collapsing ideal, the echo of a deconstructed home.
In the video directed by Charli herself, the narrator gradually becomes a prisoner in the house she built for a “perfect life.”
“House” is an allegory about modern humanity suffocating under the very ideals it has created, about the feeling of security turning into the threat itself.
That unsettling sentence repeated at the end (“I’m going to die in this house”) points not only to a physical space but to the collapse of the self we have constructed.
This collaboration is two generations approaching the same dark question from different fronts:
“Why do we end up trapped in the worlds we build for ourselves?”
🔗 Apartment No:26 Note:
The Charli XCX & John Cale partnership squeezes the future of pop and the roots of the avant-garde into the same enclosed space.
“House” is less an architectural structure than a mental room: an inner world that caves in on itself the more one tries to escape.
With minimal yet brutal language, the video and text fuse layers of queer aesthetics, post-internet existence, and modern loneliness.
