Wolf Alice Venture Into the Clearing

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.

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.”