Wolf Alice at Glastonbury 2025: Britain's best band level up

By this point, calling Wolf Alice the most consistently brilliant band of their generation feels a bit like calling the sky blue or the Glastonbury toilets harrowing – a statement of such crushing obviousness it barely merits repeating. Still, there’s something about watching them return to this festival now, on the cusp of their fourth album and newly signed to a major label, that suggests the band have realised it too. Not in a smug, victory-lap way. More in the manner of people who’ve been told repeatedly that they’re brilliant and have finally decided to believe it.

They open with ‘Formidable Cool’, which remains a fantastic title for a song and, frankly, an apt description of how the whole thing feels. That song used to sound like a swaggering threat. Now, it feels more like a confirmation. For years, Wolf Alice seemed slightly allergic to the idea of being one thing. Too heavy to be pop, too beautiful to be punk, too clever to be easily marketable. What’s changed isn’t the songs – they’ve always been this good – but the posture. There’s a newfound strut, a kind of glinting self-assurance that gives even their quietest moments the vibe of a band who know they’ve got the range and don’t need to prove it to anyone.

This Glastonbury set doesn’t so much ebb and flow as breathe – sharp inhale, feral exhale. There’s ‘Yuk Foo’ at one end of the spectrum, still as ridiculous and thrilling as ever, a song that sounds like someone chain-smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds and then throwing the lit butt into a petrol tank. And there’s ‘Safe From Heartbreak (If You Never Fall in Love)’ at the other, all soft-focus melancholy and intimate harmonies that feel like they’re whispering secrets into your bloodstream. You could make a case for either being the truest version of the band, and you’d still be wrong. The point is the contrast. Wolf Alice don’t do one mood: they do all of them, often at once.

They’re a band whose greatness has always been a little wonky, a little asymmetrical. Ellie Rowsell doesn’t perform so much as transmit: sometimes dead-eyed in rapture - like she’s lost on another plane entirely - sometimes incandescent, always magnetic in a way that refuses easy classification. On ‘The Last Man on Earth’ – possibly the band’s most epic, yet most composed, song – she builds a sort of monastic grandeur out of restraint. She is, in the nicest possible way, unknowable. Not in a way that means you wouldn’t want to go for a pint with Wolf Alice; you absolutely would. But more, they’re the band you’d absolutely want to soundtrack your existential crisis.

What’s interesting now, though, is how they’re carrying themselves. ‘How Can I Make It OK?’ ends with a few bars of ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac, slid into the outro like an elbow on a piano key. It’s not a medley or a cover. It’s more like an acknowledgement: we know our lineage, thanks, and we know we can sit comfortably within it. Later, ‘Giant Peach’ – once a full-body tantrum – tacks on brief riffs from ‘Seven Nation Army’ and ‘Iron Man’ for no apparent reason other than the fact they can. If it’s a joke, it’s a very confident one.

Even the new material arrives with its shoulders back. ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ has the swagger of a band who’ve outgrown the need to chase the perfect three-minute single. It grows sideways rather than upwards, less a banger than a mood piece with very sharp teeth. ‘The Sofa’ – a song we’re about to be blessed with imminently - is no less impressive. Neither track sounds remotely like a concession to the expectations that come with signing to a major. If anything, they sound both more and less radio-friendly than ever in the same clipped breath. You get the sense that Wolf Alice now trust their audience to come with them. They’ve earned that.

And yet they still end on ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’, because of course they do. It remains their most sentimental song, their most open-hearted, their most shared. There are people in this field tonight who’ve fallen in love to it, broken up to it, played it four times in a row on a Megabus with their head pressed against the window. It’s the song that softens all the jagged edges. Live, it’s less confessional than communal; less a love letter than a group chat. It swells, blooms, explodes and then disappears, leaving only that strange stillness that really great sets sometimes manage to conjure.

It would be tidy to say this set represents a moment of arrival, but Wolf Alice have arrived at several points already. They won the Mercury Prize. They sold out Alexandra Palace. They’re finally heading to The O2 under their own name. They’ve even headlined (smaller) festivals. What tonight reveals is a band who no longer feel they need to prove their own brilliance. They’ve stopped second-guessing themselves and who they want to be. And it’s telling that the loudest thing they say all night comes not in a lyric or a riff but in the way they carry the entire show – like people who know the crown is theirs if they want it and are finally ready to reach out and take it.