Wolf Alice have never been the sort to queue politely behind their peers. From those early EPs prowling out of London’s sticky-floored undergrowth, fangs bared and feedback coiled like a cigarette burn on satin, they felt like they’d time-travelled fully formed from some future scene, carrying secrets about distortion, desire and danger that everyone else was still decoding. Where many bands flatten out by album three, Wolf Alice have followed a rarer path: a reverse parabola with its highest point still ahead. Each release has dug deeper into possibility. Their fourth full-length, ‘
The Clearing’, isn’t a simple rung up the ladder; it’s the moment the ladder’s hoisted overhead and turned into a great big catwalk. Massive, flagrant, high-heeled rock music performed with zero self-consciousness, built on the belief that spectacle and substance not only can coexist, but must.
There’s a thrill in hearing a band recognise the scale of their own power. That charge runs through ‘The Clearing’: in the baroque detail of the arrangements, the widescreen production that welds fire and velvet into one frame, the confidence to let choruses swell to cathedral size without losing their soul. Opener ‘
Thorns’ rolls in like a muscle-car idling too long in the Californian heat. Ellie Rowsell enters, crystalline and unsettling, and the song lifts instantly. That move - stretching genre muscles before taking flight - recurs across the record. Glam smears against battered tenderness; classic-rock swagger collides with shoegaze murmur. It never tips into homage because the band inhabit the sound fully, like their sort-of-namesakes: dangerous, defiant, howling proud.
‘The Clearing’ seems intent on rewriting its own context as it plays. Rather than sitting neatly in a decade’s timeline, it hovers in mythic mid-air, a constellation shifting around four fixed points. ‘
Passenger Seat’ drifts through a mirror-world where Fleetwood Mac never imploded, heartbreak gleaming like moonlight on petrol. A track later, ‘
Play It Out’ bathes in translucent melancholy, every note trembling with raw thought. ‘
Bread Butter Tea Sugar’ struts in knowingly louche, its glam stride kept fresh by sharp, modern production. Then ‘
White Horses’ lands — a canon-worthy Wolf Alice anthem with Joel Amey’s gravel grounding Ellie’s lift-off. Bigger. Bolder. Braver.
