Wolf Alice have come a long way since the North London quartet first emerged in 2013 as a young band holding a mirror up to their own emerging generation. Today, Wolf Alice’s fourth album The Clearing finds them at the peak of their powers, grown into a band of generational importance. While the bruised euphoria of their debut My Love Is Cool, which featured the Grammy®-nominated ‘Moaning Lisa Smile,’ both captured and perfectly soundtracked the experience of youth first cutting their musical teeth, 2018’s follow up Visions Of A Life cemented their rise with a Mercury Music Prize, before the precious hurt of 2022’s UK Number 1 album,Blue Weekend and its resultant Brit Award for Best Group. In the process, lead singer Ellie Rowsell has grown into a storytelling icon, weaving cautionary tales of how your twenties will hurt you, but in valuable ways. Wolf Alice have also toured the world multiple times headlining sold out tours, gracing numerous festival stages and supporting an array of key artists including pop icon Harry Styles. This summer so far sees them performing at Radio 1’s Big Weekend followed by a top spot at Glastonbury.
Both playful and serious, ironic and straight-talking,The Clearing is a progressive shift from a band whose exploration of love, loss and human connection has already articulated the coming-of-age experience for a whole generation. It’s a classic pop/rock album that nods to the ‘70s while remaining rooted firmly in the present. If Fleetwood Mac wrote an album today in North London, you’d get somewhere close to this run of effortlessly grand tracks, each as distinct as the last. Sonically, there is no waste, no fuss, with more authoritative melodies than the band has ever crafted before. This is a new beginning, and each of the band feels it as keenly as listeners will. Front and centre of The Clearing is Rowsell’s ever-evolving poetic storytelling alongside an innate desire for Ellie, Joff, Theo and Joel to have fun, secure in their ambition and ability at this unique moment in time. The Clearing encapsulates that freeing feeling of finding a moment of peace and clarity, having survived the freewheeling frivolity of your 20s, emerging into your future and is a portrait of Wolf Alice standing on the precipice of a new decade in both life and art.
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