Album: Wolf Alice - Clearing

Wolf Alice are a band who consistently over-deliver. Their presentation is so staid, their cited influences so safe (The Beatles! Blur!), their politics so “bad things are bad, m’kay?”, that they give every impression they’re going to be bland and generic.

Yet over the past decade and a bit, they’ve consistently built a sound that is super distinctive: a kind of supersized shoegaze that allows their relatively straightforward songwriting to grow into something oceanic and dreamlike. It’s no wonder they fill stadiums, and it’s great that it’s not spectacle, personal soap operas or adhering to meat and potatoes formulae that has got them here but ultimately sound.

They’ve grown in confidence, too. Their brilliant (and actually under-appreciated) cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” in 2021 showed that they were comfortable plugging themselves in to a long tradition of acts who use ultra mainstream tropes for interesting ends. And now hooked up with mega producer Greg Kurstin (Harry Styles, Adele etc) they’ve really brought that to the fore, describing their new sound, in typically unassuming fashion as “classic rock/pop”, and loading up on unabashed nods to the likes of Roxy at their smoothest, Wings, Fleetwood Mac, Carly Simon, even a bit of full Vegas Barbra Streisand in the opener “Thorns”.

It’s gutsy to strip away their signature layers of guitars and replace them with distinctly showbizzy strings and pianos, but it works. First that’s because, as ever in their work, and unlike, say, Styles, there’s not one iota of irony to it. Second, it’s not over-reverential either: like Lana Del Rey at her Norman Fucking Rockwell best, it makes classic opulence sound modern. And third, their songwriting has matured so that they can transplant the big sonic crescendos into high drama ones. There are issues: for all those crescendos, and the jaunty “Bread Butter Tea Sugar” notwithstanding, it’s all a bit ballady (although when did that ever stop Adele coining it in?). 

The earnestness of the “I’m a grown-up now, facing an uncertain future” vibe can get a little bit like that moment in a musical when the protagonist falls to the ground in a single spotlight on a darkened stage and croons something along the lines of “Where have I come from? Where will I goooooo?” But it’s hard to begrudge them that moment, because for the most part the tunes are pretty much on point, they’re really starting to groove, and it’d be very easy to see this album catapulting them into bigger leagues still. As ever, at their best, they manage to parlay what should be quite predictable and formulaic into something unique and lovely.

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