Wolf Alice Venture Into the Clearing

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It’s typical for the 2010s alt-rockers’ trajectory to play out in one of two fashions: burst bright and loud, and then glide at roughly the same altitude from there on; or, soar up from modest beginnings onto grander stages, a long-term pitch into a large-scale coronation. Wolf Alice took a different path entirely—they’re a band playing to bigger crowds and wider scopes than they ever had in their grunge-pop beginnings on My Love Is Cool, yet their outlook has only grown more introspective and pared-down.

“We threw a lot of stuff at Blue Weekend,” vocalist Ellie Rowsell says of the group’s previous record, released in 2021. “There were a lot of tracks in all the songs. I remember when we were listening to the stems for ‘Lipstick on the Glass,’ and I was like, ‘God, there’s so many really nice things in this song that you don’t necessarily hear when you hear the whole thing, because your ears can only hold onto so many things.’” But, unusually for a band with their history—and especially one making the move to a major label—Wolf Alice pulled back from this instinct right on the precipice of the biggest era for the band yet.

One of the first things you’ll notice on The Clearing, the fourth record for the quartet out of Seven Sisters, is its compositional approach as a back-to-basics project for the group. Tracks still well up in typical Wolf Alice fashion, as on the lushly orchestral opener “Thorns” or the glam cabaret number “Bloom Baby Bloom,” but they often emerge from fairly simple kernels, many rooted in rudimentary piano or acoustic guitar parts. “This time around, we were a bit more picky and choosy,” Rowsell says of the process—paring down the number of parts, and putting more of a concentrated spotlight on every individual component that goes into any given song. The scope of Wolf Alice remains large, but the interior world at the center is more intimate than ever before.

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Where we last left Wolf Alice before The Clearing, the group had filtered their knack for emotive heft and dynamic hooks into a loosely narrative affair on Blue Weekend, a record whose cohesive breadth let each subsequent song tumble into the next, weaving together interrelated musings on heartbreak, venturing forth from home, and carving out a personal assurance in the face of all the world throws at you. But while that album’s flow was perhaps Wolf Alice’s most seamless, it took painstaking work to become so. “On Blue Weekend, we tried to make it really flow,” Rowsell explains. “We were so obsessed with the sequencing, because we knew that a lot of the songs were quite polarizing and different.” The difference this time came from a concerted effort to work with songs cut from the same cloth from the very start—to make everything sound like it was “from the same project,” as Rowsell puts it, rather than writing the tracks first and leaving the task of making them fit for later. “I still care about sequencing and transitions, but there was maybe less pressure, because that cohesiveness was a goal from the pre-writing stage, instead of us doing it all as an afterthought.”

The group partly attributes the more organic process of putting together The Clearing to a refocused look at how enduring songwriters of the 1960s and ‘70s approached even their most sprawling fare. Percussionist Joel Amey cites George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu as two touchpoints in early conversations for the record, noting the former’s captivation in spite of all the “different directions” it goes and the latter’s “somewhat genre-less” priority on what its various members could bring to the table together. And, in looking back at this era of music in particular and the instrumentation that birthed it, Wolf Alice’s stripped-down songwriting sprung forth from there. “We were putting such an onus on that at the beginning of it,” Amey elaborates. “We were removing ourselves somewhat from plugins and synthesizers and programmed drums.” Instead, the band began working out the songs on acoustic guitars in rehearsals, and Rowsell began bringing in piano-led demos that only added to that new sonic palette. “By the time you get to your fourth album,” Amey adds, “those little unusual changes of pace are really exciting.”

Bassist Theo Ellis sees it as a natural extension of what the band has always been mindful of: “We have a tendency to not want to date any of our music too definitely. We always want it to have a certain degree of timelessness.” He mentions that the band has frequently written against trends that other musicians may chase to keep up with the times, such as pitch-shifted vocals or ultra-contemporary cultural references, in an attempt to allow the music to withstand the course of time. What felt more pressing to him for The Clearing was a further push to lean into the collective energy the band felt touring Blue Weekend, building songs that could emphatically feed off “the shared experience from stage to crowd.” “Seeing people singing songs like ‘Delicious Things’ and ‘The Last Man on Earth’ back to you is one of the most powerful things I experienced on the last record. We were quite keen to pursue that avenue a little more, and some of the choruses that feel more present to me when I listen to The Clearing might be because of that.”

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That exuberance and shared joy spill over into the songs’ lyrics themselves, a place where Rowsell sought to capture how her connections to others feed into how she carries herself. She singles out the thematic progression of The Clearing’s opening trio as a prime example of this, where the insecurities and self-criticisms of “Thorns” give way to an unapologetic confidence on “Bloom Baby Bloom,” and then resolve into an ode to the comforting refuge of bonds with other women on “Just Two Girls.” “‘Just Two Girls’ is unashamedly a little cheesy,” Rowsell says, “but it’s like, ‘I don’t care, this is what I like doing and this is what I like singing about. This is what I’ve liked writing about.’” She notes that this song in particular springs from her love of female storytelling across all artforms, and an affinity from just listening to her friends who are women talk. In “Just Two Girls,” her songwriting becomes a continuation of those same stories she adores. “Putting anyone’s stories in a space that you’re not used to hearing that side of is really exciting to us. It’s a privilege to be able to do.”

But, in a rarity for Wolf Alice, that kind of personal unfurling isn’t just Rowsell’s to sing. Late in the record, Amey takes vocal co-lead for the first time on “White Horses,” a galloping duet between him and Rowsell about home and family. The song came from pieces of a demo Amey came up with late in the record’s first batch of songs, initially something more akin to a “weird little poem” he had written. “I live by the sea and I fish sometimes,” Amey explains. “The guy who owns the fishing yard once said to me that when you see white horses—the tips of the waves—you have to return home.”

In a way, this thread brings The Clearing full circle with Blue Weekend, and, arguably, further deepens how that record delved into its writing on place and belonging. On The Clearing‘s closer “The Sofa,” Rowsell’s narrator laments not making it “out to California”—itself a subtle callback to the Los Angeles-set anxieties of Blue Weekend‘s “Delicious Things”—and feeling “stuck in Seven Sisters.” Ellis likens the band’s lyrical recurrence of California imagery as a mirror for the ways that setting embodies a kind of “dreamlike place” of realization, more symbolic than literal. In Rowsell’s case, she cites the title of The Clearing as an echo of what “The Sofa,” and the rest of the record, captures in this introspection. “It means just taking stock,” she says, “hopefully feeling a little that [things are gonna be] okay.” But she complicates that description of “The Clearing” as a state of mind by saying she also likens it to a hypothetical place, a space that occupies just as much meaning as any of the named settings where Wolf Alice’s work ventures.

If there’s a narrative that can be charted of Wolf Alice from their beginnings to the present moment that The Clearing occupies, it’s that: a reacquaintance with how the band has always been concerned with place and the people who matter to them, and a way to carve out their own unique home—tangibly and metaphorically. In Rowsell’s own words: “That’s the privilege of being a bit older—you have things to look back on in a new way.”

Wolf Alice are currently on tour here in America. Check out their upcoming dates here.

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Natalie Marlin is a freelance music and film writer based in Minneapolis with writing in Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Pitchfork and Little White Lies. She was previously as a staff writer at Allston Pudding. She is always at the front of the pit. Follow her on Twitter at @NataliesNotInIt.