How do you follow up the most talked-about, culture-creating album campaign in recent memory? For Charli XCX, the answer – as ever for the perpetually shapeshifting pop pioneer – has been to do a swift 180. In place of the feral lime green fever dream of Brat, a new world is emerging based around XCX’s soundtrack for director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights: gothic, melodramatic, and rooted in a different aesthetic palette entirely. First came House, the singer’s violin-laden collaboration with The Velvet Underground’s John Cale; earlier this week, she released a more hooky but no less cinematic cut in the form of Chains of Love.
At the helm of the latter’s visuals is multi-hyphenate New York-based creative C Prinz. A modern polymath working across choreography, creative direction and film directing, Prinz was XCX’s movement coach for the whole of the Brat project, helping sculpt the singer’s visual language and taking it to stages from the Grammy Awards to a headline spot at Glastonbury. For Chains of Love, the pair drew on this established connection to create a video that is dramatic and extreme in an entirely new way. In it, XCX hangs off a giant white banqueting table raised to 45 degrees before being flung through the air. At other moments, a flurry of knives come hurling towards her; later she slams a heel through the table as shards of glass fly up around her. It’s passionate and visceral - a depiction of the song’s obsessive themes rooted in feeling and physicality.
C Prinz
'Chains of Love as an idea is that there's something that you're gripped to or from. We've all gone through these torturous heartbreaks where you feel like you're in a wind tunnel, just getting whipped,' explains Prinz. 'Some days you're totally fine and then you run into the person or you see a text message and it's like this total whiplash and you're ripped back to this really intense place of desperation. I started developing this idea of the dance of dreaded love, where you can't quite tell if you're in control or not in control; you can't tell if the love itself is coming from you or coming at you; you can't tell who's winning and who's losing. You're just getting thrashed around by the idea or the energy of love itself.'
For the shoot, the singer was fully invested, performing many of her own stunts and, at one point, quite literally bleeding for her art ('She was really going for it. She didn't even notice that she’d cut her knee on the table,' Prinz remembers). It’s a level of commitment symptomatic of the pair’s creative relationship, where nothing is off limits and the body is key. 'Me and Charli's relationship is rooted in the physical; the way that we crawl and thrash and spit and lick and shake our asses,' Prinz laughs. 'It's where our work lives. So collaborating in this capacity, although we wanted to shift it into this new aesthetic and this new tonal world, I think that the essence of an artist always prevails.'
Charli XCX on the Brat tour
Indeed, more than anything, it’s perhaps this inimitable performance style that links XCX’s new work to her previous era the most. The framing is different, but Charli is still Charli. Prinz remembers building this physical language for Brat in a very 'instinctual way'. 'I always say that if no one knows that I was a part of the project, then I've done a job well. It's my goal to be invisible across all mediums, but particularly with choreography,' she explains. 'We see so many performances these days by women in pop that treat movement like spectacle in the best of ways – like something manicured and polished - and it's stunning. But I think both Charli and I have never fully identified with that. When you put on her music, it makes you want to freak out and be your worst, and so that was what we did.
'The first iteration of Brat that we built, we were in this warehouse in Luton for 10 days, just playing the album so loud. The whole place was shaking and we were just trying shit out,' she continues. 'Sometimes I would perform the whole concert for her based on my own instinct of what I thought we should do, sometimes I would say, ‘Let's just thrash around’, and we would sculpt it in real time. That improvisational nature of how we built it, that's why it feels so invisible, because it was built on instinct.'
Though Prinz trained in classical dance at Chicago’s Loyola University, she came to the medium later than most. 'I was always the worst one in the room, and always having to catch up,' she recalls. Far from holding her back, however, this experience became pivotal to the way she approaches her own work. As exemplified with the Brat tour, Prinz’ outlook is one based on gut feeling and working with an artist’s own capabilities and skill sets.
'I never want to put anybody through what I went through of feeling like they need to fit into a box, so I've dedicated the movement side of my career to leaning into what people do naturally and then trying to heighten it times a million,' she says. 'Creative directing is a more multi-layered type of world-building, so there's definitely a bit more precision, but with any project I always try to keep a deep aliveness in it. The willingness to change is one of the best mindsets to have as an artist. Sometimes, if you hold things too tightly, they’re going to end up shooting you in the foot. So I keep this improvisational, very alive feeling buzzing beneath the surface across all mediums.'
Alongside her work with XCX, Prinz has established a longstanding relationship with several other of modern music’s most exciting and boundary-shaking artists, from Doechii to Caroline Polachek. Prinz notably worked with Doechii on her incredible 2025 Grammy performance, helping the meticulous hip-hop star craft an impeccably tight show that was military in its precision. To bring to life the three-minute section took the pair a whole month.
Though, on the surface, the approaches couldn’t be more different, Prinz sees a more important common thread. 'I feel like my films carry a lot of energy, and that energy creates the story and the feeling. It's hard for people to feel things through the internet today, and so maybe that charged energy resonates with people in a way that I didn’t realise [at the start] was going to happen,' she says. 'And when someone can feel something, then they hit you up for that. I think the only thing I believe in this industry is the law of attraction.'
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