Wolf Alice - The Clearing

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.

This isn’t a softening. It’s the sound of tunnelling deeper, uncovering larger caverns. The volume knob hasn’t been turned down, just re-engineered into a pressure gauge. Songs swell and collapse like unpredictable weather, one moment sprawling, the next falling silent. Guitars shimmer with LA sunburn; vocals catch the sodium glow of sleepless nights; when impact comes, it’s less assault than cathedral doors swinging open on storm-force hinges. The blades remain, plated, sharpened, now carving frescos instead of flesh.

Some of the record’s electricity comes from the headroom in the mix. Joel’s drumming stays conversational, switching from forensic punctuation to primal thump in a heartbeat. Joff Oddie’s guitars still leap from midnight tube-train shriek to intricate folklore, now framed by negative space that makes every outburst sting sharper. Theo Ellis moors it all with a mix of casual precision and subterranean heft. The biggest shift is air: songs pause, inhale, let lyrics land before surging on, like a dancer resetting between spins. It’s deliberate, but never too clean — the weird edges stay gloriously intact.

Rowsell reaffirms her place as one of the century’s indispensable British vocalists: elusive yet unmistakable, slicing emotion so finely the bruise appears seconds later. Across ‘The Clearing’ she’s brittle as frost at dawn, then suddenly triumphant. In intimate moments, she disarms; in the roar, she rides like a Valkyrie. The contrasts bring new textures, not compromise.

Lyrically, this might be their sharpest work. Fragments and impressions take precedence over direct narratives, but lose nothing for it. Restlessness runs through the record, twined with questions of legacy, adulthood and the double helix of beauty and violence. These songs feel written under low lamps, notebooks blotched with desire and disquiet. Sex prowls the corridors; grief strips the paint; joy flickers like a faulty reel. The opacity isn’t evasive - it invites projection.

What sets ‘The Clearing’ apart is the sense of a band entering their imperial phase without tipping into excess. It’s not the anxious brilliance of a debut, nor the overdrive of a second album proving itself, or the cautious refinement of a third. It’s rarer: instinct and craft in full communion. These songs are built to be inhabited: headphones become immersion tanks, and living rooms become stages. There’s no passive listening here.

That’s the trick Wolf Alice pull better than anyone else. Others might chase bombast, crank the decibels, game the algorithms; few weld swagger to soul this convincingly. ‘The Clearing’ doesn’t just cement their place among Britain’s greats; it shifts the ground beneath them. It feels less like a step forward than an arrival long in the making: potential once whispered about, now towering in phosphorescent clarity. Their finest hour, not because it’s different for the sake of it, but because it’s what they’ve been carrying all along.