Wolf Alice – The Clearing
If most indie bands are forever haunted by That Song—the one they’ll be forced to play at every gig until retirement—Wolf Alice have dodged that fate. Their biggest single, Don’t Delete the Kisses, might come closest, but the band has never been defined by one track. Their strength has always been their range: noisy and feral one moment, tender and cinematic the next. With The Clearing, their fourth album, the challenge is whether they can channel that breadth into something both ambitious and coherent.
The record certainly sounds bigger than anything they’ve attempted before. Producer Greg Kurstin layers in lush strings, gleaming piano, and polished pop flourishes that place Wolf Alice closer to the sheen of festival headliners than the grit of their early grunge roots. Opening track Thorns sets the tone: melodramatic strings, looping refrains, and Ellie Rowsell’s vocals caught between intimacy and grandeur. Bloom Baby Bloom takes the opposite route—energetic, punchy, and almost too neat for a band whose best moments often come from frayed edges.
The highlights are undeniable. Passenger Seat and Bread Butter Tea Sugar strike a perfect balance between pop immediacy and emotional weight, while White Horses—with drummer Joel Amey on vocals—feels fresh and intimate, a reminder of the band’s chemistry when it’s just the four of them. But elsewhere, the polish starts to smooth things out a little too much. Just Two Girls plays with charm but leans into repetition; Leaning Against the Wall is strong until a flat digital drum track undercuts it. Closing track The Sofa chooses comfort over chaos but feels more like a polite fade-out than a bold finale.
If Wolf Alice’s earlier albums sometimes felt patchy because they were reaching for too much, The Clearing feels restrained because it’s trying to please everyone. There’s a professionalism to the record that makes it hard to fault, but also harder to love with the same intensity as their best work. The ambition is still there—moments of wit, charisma, and raw emotion—but they’re wrapped in a sheen that occasionally blunts their edge.
Wolf Alice remain one of the UK’s most exciting rock bands, capable of being tender, ferocious, and inventive often within the same song. The Clearing proves they can play on the biggest stage with confidence. But whether it will go down as the Wolf Alice album is another question. For now, it’s a solid step forward—glimmering, ambitious, but not quite the knockout blow some might have hoped for.
