Wolf Alice ‘The Clearing’ review: One of Britain’s best bands sound more confident than ever
A 70s rock vibe makes for a sublime fourth Wolf Alice album
The glorious and sweeping strings that open Wolf Alice’s fourth album are the first hint at the sense of freedom that defines The Clearing. After becoming one of the UK’s biggest and best new bands with 2015 debut My Love is Cool and follow-up Visions of a Life, the band took another step forwards with 2021’s Blue Weekend, a divine third album that also left its scars.
Blue Weekend was a revelation of an album, one that grappled with the tumult of your late twenties. On The Clearing, with the band all now in their thirties, they bask in the self-understanding that can come with ageing, and the work they’ve put in.
The album’s first song, ‘Thorns’, with its mighty string section, sees Rowsell consider why she continues with her craft (“Maybe I’m a masochist / Don’t know why I must persist to write a song and dance about it”). Two songs later, on the simply glorious ‘Just Two Girls’, which skips along with pure abandon above sprightly piano, she seems to answer her own question — it is far and away the most fun Wolf Alice have ever sounded.
To achieve this sense sonically, the band turn to 70s rock and a crisp, timeless sound. On lead single ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, the band’s signature snarl is filtered through an intriguingly funky piano line, finding new methods to provide the same punch as ever. Elsewhere, ‘Passenger Seat’ is the closest they get to Fleetwood Mac pastiche, all stacked vocal harmonies and driving acoustic guitar. There’s also a bit of Queen in the strut of ‘Bread Butter Tea Sugar’, while ‘White Horses’ is the closest they sound here to their indie beginnings.
As bassist Theo Ellis explained in the band’s recent Rolling Stone UK cover feature, Wolf Alice wanted to use The Clearing to play up to rock-star tropes. “The iconography of a band is gui-tars and leather and all those kinds of things,” he said. “Obviously, everyone has done this before, but I think we wanted to play up to those stereotypes in a slightly more fun, reverential way.”
On their cover shoot, they were clad in leather and denim, looking like more of a band than ever before. It seeps out in the sound of The Clearing too, an album which sees Rowsell step-ping out as the focal point of the group, but with Wolf Alice feeling like more of a united front at the same time.
On the album’s last and best track, ‘The Sofa’, Rowsell laments her unsuccessful attempts at an escape and a fresh start, instead basking in feeling a little more comfortable within the world she’s already built for herself: “Didn’t make it out to California / Where I thought I might clean the slate / Feels a little like I’m stuck in Seven Sisters / North London, or England / And maybe that’s OK.”
On The Clearing, the best new British band of the past decade find a comfortable new home in a new sound that’s more confident than ever. They’ve truly earned it.