Wolf Alice formed in London in the early 2010s. Although originally an acoustic duo composed of singer/guitarist Ellie Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie, once bass player Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey joined, the band quickly rose up the ranks of their home city’s indie rock scene.
Wolf Alice’s debut single, ‘Fluffy’, and the subsequent EP, Blush, came out in 2013. Headline tours of the UK and European mainland soon followed. By the end of 2013, Wolf Alice had become the UK’s most blogged about band according to statistical analyses performed by Hype Machine and BBC Radio.
The band’s next EP, 2014’s Creature Songs, cranked the hype-meter a few notches higher, with the single ‘Moaning Lisa Smile’ getting airtime in the States and on Triple J. Their debut album, My Love Is Cool, surfaced in June 2015, making it to #2 in the UK charts and leading to a high-profile Australian headline tour.
The success of the band’s second LP, 2017’s Visions of a Life, precipitated US TV appearances, two separate Australian tours and a support slot on the European leg of Foo Fighters’ Concrete and Gold tour. The album also won the UK’s coveted Mercury Music Prize and cemented Wolf Alice as one of the most prominent guitar bands in contemporary music.
Their third album, Blue Weekend, was released in June 2021 to unanimous applause. The band debuted tracks from the record at the recent Reading and Leeds festivals, affirming their status as a big-tent rock band that inspires cult-like worship.
Wolf Alice have now unveiled a filmed performance of their track ‘Lipstick On the Glass’ as part of the Jim Beam Welcome Sessions. It was recorded in North London’s Union Chapel with the backing of a nine-piece choir.
To get you up to speed, here are five reasons you should check out Wolf Alice.
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Their performance of ‘Sadboy’ on The Late Show
‘Sadboy’ is one of the more laterally constructed songs on Visions of a Life—conventional verse-chorus radio fodder it ain’t. In fact, between the West Coast breeziness of the verses, the U2 anthemics of the mini-chorus, the Eastern-influenced noise rock of the bridge and Rowsell’s deviations into mutant voice modulation and hardcore punk screaming, it’s an impossible song to neatly categorise.
I can think of no better introduction to Wolf Alice than their performance of ‘Sadboy’ on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert from 2017. The recorded version will also sufficiently titillate, but there’s much to admire about Wolf Alice’s decision to perform such a whacked out song on US television’s highest-rating night-time talk show.
They can do sing-alongs
Wolf Alice won the 2018 Mercury Music Prize for their second album, Visions Of a Life. Over the last half-decade, the Mercury judges have largely favoured artists working at the margins of mainstream music or whose work has an explicitly political bent.
In this sense, Wolf Alice were an outside chance, but their performance at the Mercury ceremony displayed their music’s unifying potential. They performed ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’, a thoughtfully composed dream pop number with a chant-along chorus: “What if it’s not meant for me? / Love.” It’s neither cloying nor challenging-for-the-sake-of-it, and the same can be said of the glut of sing-along candidates in the band’s discography.
‘Lipstick On the Glass’ possesses an effortless melodic grace, but doesn’t sacrifice any of its emotional complexity. There’s a clip on YouTube of Wolf Alice playing ‘Lipstick On the Glass’ at the O2 Academy Bournemouth in late July. It was their first proper show after the COVID break and Blue Weekend was only six weeks old, and yet, the crowd participation in ‘Lipstick…’ is phenomenal.
They can do monster riffs and ear-piercing shoegaze
For four individuals who came of age in the early years of the new millennium, Wolf Alice do an excellent job at distilling the myriad alt-rock and indie trends of the 1990s. They were back at the Mercury Prize in 2021 and this time they elected to perform ‘Smile’, the second single from Blue Weekend.
While ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’ and ‘Lipstick on the Glass’ are pure dream pop, ‘Smile’ is a quasi-industrial rock song built around a bulldozing riff. It’s just a taste of the band’s gnarlier side, which is apparent in the shoegaze number ‘Your Loves Whore’ and the bratty grunge-punk song ‘You’re a Germ’ (both from My Love Is Cool).
Meanwhile, Blue Weekend’s ‘Play the Greatest Hits’ is a first wave punk thrasher, with Rowsell adopting a hysterical vocal demeanour.
Ellie Rowsell is a great lyricist
Despite its title, ‘Play the Greatest Hits’ is not some fuck-you to the band’s fairweather fans. Rather, with lines like, “Life seems to move in circles / When you take your straight white lines,” it could be a comment on the touring lifestyle or simply a snapshot of life for a 20-something in 21st century Britain—Europe’s epicentre of cocaine use.
‘Lipstick On the Glass’ contains some one of Roswell’s finest lyrics. The song inhabits a kind of moral grey area as Rowsell mulls over a romantic partner’s infidelity.
The chorus—”I take you back / Yeah, I know it seems surprising when there’s lipstick still on the glass”— raises more questions than it answers and demonstrates how our actions and emotional responses don’t always align with our abstract conception of morality.
Blue Weekend is the band’s best album yet
Visions of a Life won the Mercury Music Prize and saw the band sell out the 10,000 capacity Alexandra Palace in North London. NME gave it a five star rating and Drowned In Sound described it as “one of the most crucial, relevant, angry, cool and vibrant records of the decade.”
Suffice to say, it was always going to be a hard one to top. But Blue Weekend—recorded and released this June, just prior to the UK’s comprehensive reopening—is yet further proof that Wolf Alice are in it for the long haul. The critical reaction has been unanimous: from NME to Pitchfork, The Guardian and The Independent, everyone agrees it’s Wolf Alice’s best album to date.
Blue Weekend encapsulates all of the alt-rock and pop, grunge, shoegaze and indie balladry of the band’s first two records, while sounding at turns weirder and altogether more confident. It also possesses a certain sonic grandeur, helped along by Arcade Fire and Coldplay producer Markus Dravs.
Watch the full performance of Wolf Alice for Jim Beam Welcome Sessions below
