“T
here’s just this undeniable magic about bands, isn’t there?” says Joff Oddie. Since their gorgeous, fiery debut album ‘My Love Is Cool’, there’s been no better proof of that than Wolf Alice themselves. A group of friends who look like absolute rock stars onstage but celebrate big wins like the 2018 Mercury Prize with a lock-in at their local. How could you not want to be in their gang?
“I don’t think I ever really realised how much that was a thing,” admits Theo Ellis. Ahead of their third album ‘Blue Weekend’, he told Dork that all he really cared about was the songs they made and the gigs they played. “What else comes with being a band?”
Four years later, and ‘The Clearing’ sees Wolf Alice properly realise their own power, perhaps for the first time. “I was always so worried that things would end at any moment. You’d throw everything into making a record and then put all your energy into touring, but I always felt like I was clinging on,” says Theo, two weeks before their fourth album is released. “Going into ‘The Clearing’, though, I had this moment of acceptance that maybe this is what we’ll do forever. It felt like we were on solid ground.”
“Yeah, I’m in my thirties now. Maybe I’m not going to go to university,” adds Ellie Rowsell with a smirk.
“I’m in my thirties now. Maybe I’m not going to go to university”
‘Blue Weekend’ was a tough album for Wolf Alice. It took a while for them and producer Markus Dravs to get on the same page, and it was made during COVID-enforced lockdowns. When it was finally done, the band could only play the songs in a rehearsal space, hoping things would eventually return to normal. “I did start to wonder if it would be the last thing we did,” admits Joel Amey. Their first gig back was a headline slot at Latitude Festival 2021, and the band spent a strange 18 months on the road. “We were really fortunate we could do anything, though,” says Ellie. “Other bands weren’t so lucky.”
The plan was to take some time off after touring ‘Blue Weekend’. They managed three months before they were back in a studio together in Seven Sisters – but even before that, song ideas were flying about in the group chat. “I just remember everyone being really excited,” says Joff. When they were reunited, they opened up a laptop and started building things up around programmed beats like they had for their previous albums. It quickly felt like they were repeating themselves, though. To make things feel fresh, they decided to take a step back, pick up acoustic guitars and write everything down on a giant shared roll of paper. The mantra was ‘less is more’, but at no point does ‘The Clearing’ feel stripped down.
Wolf Alice were inspired by pop songs performed by rock groups, particularly the playfulness of The Beatles, the sugariness of Fleetwood Mac, and bands that could be both cheesy and cool. “I know we bang on about watching the Get Back Beatles doc, but it was inspiring to see the attitude of four friends getting together to do something they all love, and seeing what the by-product was. They were never precious about it either,” says Theo.
“We set out to make something a bit more cohesive than we’d done before,” says Ellie of the vision for ‘The Clearing’. Wolf Alice’s 2013 EP ‘Blush’ had the twinkling folk of the title-track sitting alongside the snotty grunge of ‘She’, which set the blueprint for everything that followed. The band have an uncanny ability to create wildly different-sounding tracks that somehow always feel like a Wolf Alice song. “It’s not that we were trying to be uncohesive before, we were just excited we could make a song that sounded like ‘Feeling Myself’ and something like ‘Safe From Heartbreak (If You Never Fall In Love)’,” says Joel. “Maybe it’s because we were on our fourth album, but if we did that again, it would just feel tired.” He admits that could easily change in the future, but for ‘The Clearing’, being cohesive felt really exciting.
“I don’t think we really respected the tradition of an album before either,” says Theo. Before, Wolf Alice just put their very best songs together and that was that, but for ‘The Clearing’, if something didn’t make sense to the sonic world they were building or the story they wanted to tell, it didn’t make the cut. It means there are a handful of great electronic songs sitting on a hard drive somewhere. “We just didn’t want to bastardise it.”
“‘The Clearing’ does feel different to what we’ve done before, but it doesn’t feel like we’ve gone down a shockingly different path,” says Ellie. “It feels like us.”
“It doesn’t feel like we’ve gone down a shockingly different path. It feels like us”
Across Wolf Alice’s first three albums, Ellie wrote songs about trying to navigate a world that didn’t always make the most sense. These coming-of-age anthems were fuelled by rage, heartbreak and a lot of desperate hope, while their very best songs – ‘Bros’, ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’, ‘Beautifully Unconventional’ and plenty more – feel celebratory despite the uncertainty.
Ellie is a lot more sure of herself on ‘The Clearing’. Across 12 tracks, she taps into the same emotions with a newfound clarity and ushers you towards a place of peace. It starts with ‘Thorns’. A bit grand and showy, it always sounded like the perfect opening to an album, while self-aware lyrics about what it means to write songs tackled the hangover leftover from ‘Blue Weekend’. Sharing an introspective collection of songs about genuine heartbreak led to some discomfort, especially as fans picked apart what was truth and what was artistic licence. “I had to acknowledge that it’s just not a big deal,” she explains. “Well, maybe it is a big deal, but it doesn’t feel like one right now, and that’s really freeing.”
With that song in the bag, the floodgates opened. “There’s a certain musical theatre aspect to that song, and once you’ve gone that cheesy, it kinda sets a bar,” she grins, before quickly adding that nothing on ‘The Clearing’ is too jazz-handy.
“From the very first demos, bits of humour were creeping into Ellie’s lyrics as well, which was really fresh,” says Joel. “Sometimes you can forget that when you’re in a band like ours, you can write songs that are fun or have a wink to them.” Whichever way you look at it, opening your comeback single with the lyrics “Do I have to make you sit on your hands? / Fucking baby, baby man,” is very funny.
“A lot of the time, you’re so desperate to do the next thing, you don’t think about how exactly you want to do it. For this album, I focused on what I enjoyed and asked myself, How do I go forward doing more of that?” says Ellie. The band also embraced the idea that it was cool to try. You’ve probably seen the choreographed glam rock video for ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ and heard Ellie’s classic rock falsetto. Like ‘Yuk Fu’ and ‘Smile’, ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ sees Ellie push back at the expectations that come with being the female vocalist in a rock band – but while those other songs see her screaming with fury, ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ is deliberately delicate. As she sings, “I’m so sick and tired of trying to play it hard.”
“Once you’ve gone that cheesy, it kinda sets a bar”
Taking inspiration from Charli xcx and Self Esteem, ‘Play It Again’ sees her wrestle with the fear of getting older in the band, but ends with the desire to “age with excitement, feel my world expand”, while the shimmering ‘Just Two Girls’ is about “friendship, having a good chat and the importance of that.” The band shot a video for the song yesterday and, while listening to it for the hundredth time, Ellie realised she had absolutely no idea what people will make of it. “It’s very sugary, it’s very fun.”
Like the rest of the songs on ‘The Clearing’, Ellie isn’t worried, though. “It’s a weird contradiction. I was trying harder to make things clearer and be more intentional with my word choices, but I cared a lot less about making the songs really truthful,” she explains, with the album exploring relationships and moments of self-reflection. “I used to feel a responsibility to the emotion of the experience, but I’ve been able to let go of that. I’m not writing these songs to remember something.”
“I can’t think of another Wolf Alice song like ‘Just Two Girls’. It’s a lot more upbeat and dancey than we’ve done before,” adds Joff. “Usually, we work on songs to death, but that one just came together so quickly. I couldn’t get it out of my head for ages, though.”
“There’s nothing more romantic to me than music”
Inspired by the camaraderie of making ‘The Clearing’ and the band’s desire to play to everyone’s strengths, Joel started writing what would become ‘White Horses’ – a giddy, euphoric song about identity and chosen family. “My mum and my aunt were adopted, and for years, it posed questions of where our roots lay for all of us, but for me, they never seemed like answers I needed to find out. I was on this big adventure with my best mates. I felt that the answers to ‘Who I am?’ and ‘Where do I come from?’ didn’t matter so much; I’d chosen my family and they were the people around me,” he explained in a statement when the track was released. Finding out his grandmother came from Saint Helena helped some of the niggling doubts that start when you hit your thirties, but it did nothing to change the bonds he had made with those around him. Working on it closely with his bandmates, it became an anthem of belonging. Very Wolf Alice.
There were no nerves about bringing the idea to the rest of the band, but he found releasing it terrifying. “People seem to like it though, which is cool,” he says, before Joff sweeps in. “It’s such a wicked song.”
Music was what first gave Joel that sense of belonging. “There’s nothing more romantic to me than music,” he explains. Growing up in Surrey, his bedroom was covered in band posters, and he religiously read music magazines until he was old enough to make the 40-minute train ride into London for gigs. “Seeing a band play live was the most exciting thing in the world, but I don’t think I ever really understood how important that was at the time.” He saw The Horrors at a venue in Elephant & Castle and afterwards, spent two years dressing just like them. “I wanted to be part of that gang.”
“That’s how the best bands make you feel,” says Joff. “There’s just something permeable about it. It’s not exclusionary. It feels close enough to touch, and there’s this culture around it.”
“It would just be awful if young people couldn’t go and see bands”
When Wolf Alice first got together via online message boards and meeting at gigs, their ambition was to sell out London’s 150-capacity Old Blue Last. Later this year, they headline the O2 Arena, which is 133 times bigger.
£1 from every ticket sold on the ten-date run will be donated to the LIVE trust, which supports UK grassroots artists, venues and promoters. Earlier this year, Joff appeared in Parliament to give evidence about the importance of independent venues and act as living proof of their success. “One of the things we risk is that music becomes a middle- and upper-class sport,” he said.
“We love bands, we love music. It gave us so much, and we want to see that continue,” he tells Dork today. “It would just be awful if young people couldn’t go and see bands, or if new bands didn’t have the space and resources to make the step up to take part in that grand tradition that we’ve all kind of been very lucky to be a part of. It’s a huge part of our national identity, we all love it, and we want to see it continue.”
“It’s so fucking tough for artists right now. We’re in the position we’re in, and sometimes we have to have a conversation about whether we can do certain things,” admits Joel. “I have so much admiration for anyone who’s doing it.”
Despite how difficult it is, there is a lot of brilliant new music being released, with the band listing off Florence Road, The New Eves, Folk Bitch Trio, Tyler Ballgame and Cameron Winter as examples of who’s exciting them – and those are just the ones they can think of on the spot. Wolf Alice have been such a big part of the UK scene for the past decade, they’ve also inspired the next generation.
“One of the greatest honours of my life is to have people come and have a sense of community at a gig. If that ends with people pursuing music together or being inspired in some other way, that’s amazing,” says Theo, still not wanting to take too much credit. “Bringing people together is one of the most incredible parts of being a band, and we all feel very proud that we can do that. It’s the privilege of that success,” adds Joff.
“We also want to remember to have fun with it”
Wolf Alice in arenas is a big leap, even if it feels long overdue. “Yeah, we probably could have done it before,” admits Joel – but it was only after Wolf Alice supported Harry Styles on the European leg of his Love On Tour stadium run that it felt possible. “It seems scary on paper, but I was watching all three of these guys already doing it and making it look easy,” he says.
“It was about waiting until things feel right, but it’s also about wanting new experiences,” says Ellie, who got bored of thinking ‘one day we’ll do that’ and decided to just go for it.
It’s the latest in a string of bold moves for the band. They left indie label Dirty Hit after three albums and signed to Sony’s Columbia Records, home of Addison Rae, Beyoncé, Tate McRae and Oasis. They recorded ‘The Clearing’ in Los Angeles with super-producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters). Returning to Glastonbury earlier this year, shortly after releasing ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, there was the sense that Britain’s best band were finally starting to own it. “I don’t know if we’re necessarily starting to believe it…” starts Theo. “There is imposter syndrome, but there’s also just being aware that this is a big new opportunity. I’m really glad it’s happening now because we can do it with conviction.”
The confidence comes from time, experience and ‘The Clearing’. It wasn’t written with arenas in mind, but it does feel big enough to fill those spaces. “The songs are meant to be sung back at you,” says Joel. “We played ‘Thorns’ live the other night for the first time. There’s just something about it that felt different, and that’s exciting.” The song is one of the oldest on ‘The Clearing’, but the band could never get it quite right – until they started working with Greg. “That’s when I knew it was probably going to work.”
“The logic is not ‘We feel like we’re one of the best bands, therefore we should express that by playing The O2’,” says Theo. “We just feel ready to try and put on an arena show because we’ve got the songs for it and an idea of how it’ll work. Whether it’s going to be any good, I don’t know.” He’ll have a better idea tomorrow after their first day of rehearsals. “The album dictates it, though. It’s a creative expression, rather than the next thing on the ladder.” As for what comes next – headlining Reading & Leeds? A big homecoming gig at Finsbury Park? – they’ll deal with that after Christmas.
“It’s funny, people say ‘You must miss the old days of playing small venues’, but that’s what we were doing last week,” grins Ellie, with the band having just wrapped up a warm-up tour of America before a proper return in September.
Wolf Alice have been thinking about their arena gigs for a long time, but there’s still a sense of mystery when it comes to actually making their shared vision a reality. “It’s a work in progress,” says Joff.
“We want to put on a show. It’s going to be a challenge, but I’m not worrying about it,” says Ellie, before taking the sort of pause that suggests that could change at any moment. As much as ‘The Clearing’ is about a moment of peace and comfort, it’s also a reminder to keep moving forward and chase things that are exciting. “We also want to remember to have fun with it,” she continues. “That’s hard when you want it to be good, but we’re trying. It’s nice to think you can try and do something new.” ■
Taken from the September 2025 issue of Dork. Wolf Alice’s album ‘The Clearing’ is out now.
Make Up: Anna Payne
Hair Stylist: Yumi Nakada Dingle
Hair Styling Assistant: Fabien Picot
Stylist: Gary David Moore
Styling Assistant: Claire McKinstry
Styling Assistant: Leonor Carvalho
Vintage Sourcing: Phoebe De Angelis
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