Wolf Alice isn’t sure where they’re heading, but they’re not stopping any time soon. In the three years since releasing the emotional, maximalist Blue Weekend, the band has won a Brit Award, traveled across Europe with Harry Styles, and signed with Columbia Records—a directional shift toward the mainstream, and a self-possessedness that the band revels in on their fourth album, The Clearing. 15 years after forming, Wolf Alice wants to communicate a sense of agency. In its best moments, the songs strive for glorious, feverish millennial growth, communicable only by Ellie Rowsell and her confident sense of abandonment—of knowing she will land on her feet no matter from where she may fall.
Lead single “Bloom Baby Bloom” is a simmering, St. Vincent-esque rhythm that explodes into an unabashedly cinematic chorus. “I’m sick and tired of trying to play it hard!” Rowsell howls, as Greg Kurstin’s percussion swirls around her. Its final minute is one of the album’s more satisfying moments, the sort of infectious, dance-in-your-bedroom music that defined the group’s 2015 debut. “Play It Out” signals a shakeup in the band’s signature sound: What begins as a soft piano ballad unfurls quietly into a prayer over Rowsell’s future. The calm insistence of the song grounds The Clearing, amidst all its chaos, in a sense of perfect rightness, and establishes its shift away from the catchy pop-rock that defined the band’s first decade. What this means for Wolf Alice’s future is suspended in the air, a weight one notices in the album’s more self-protective lyrics, like: “I wanna age with excitement, feel my world expand, just let me play it out.”
“White Horses,” the album’s high point, proves a fruitful opportunity for drummer Joel Amey to show off his vocal chops. It’s trippy and uneasy, as Amey’s breathy exhortations roil over Joff Oddie’s cyclical guitar thrum. Rowsell swoops in on the chorus, a gorgeously cathartic synthesis of the album’s dueling senses of movement and sureness. “I do not need no rooting,” she cries, “I carry home with me.” It’s striking and, somehow, soothing—an evolved counterpart to “Bloom Baby Bloom” that affords the album a mirrored structure despite its tonal shifts.
The album slumps a bit in the second half, as it makes a half-willed descent into the depths of commercialized pop-rock. But, even at its nadir, The Clearing is far from grating: songs like “Just Two Girls,” a teasing meditation on female friendship, or “Leaning Against the Wall,” a flirtatious beseechment for a house-party hookup, are sweet and catchy if a bit trite. The songs, at times, are less adventurous than one might hope (or expect) from a band with Wolf Alice’s talents, and lines like “I know you’re no good, but you’re my wicked pleasure” aren’t exactly avant-garde, tastemaking, or revelatory. They’re saved, however, by the vivid, emotive imagery that represents the band at its best. You’d be hard-pressed not to feel something when Rowsell crows, “When the last of the sand hits the hourglass floor, carve my name on the tombstone: ‘The badman’s whore.’” That those two lines come from the same song, “Bread Butter Tea Sugar,” is a tangle best left unraveled by the listener at their leisure.
The Clearing is a pastiche of styles, from ‘70s glam-rock to the bedroom-pop of the 2010s, replete with rich atmospheres and ostentatious imagery. “Midnight Song” is a baroque slow-burn; “Safe in the World” is pleading and saccharine. “Thorns,” adorned with violins, winks at the inherent self-obsession of artistry; “The Sofa” channels Clairo’s pianistic sad-girl charisma as it attempts to paint Rowsell as a happy-go-lucky lazy girl. The songs are cleanly produced, if a bit whiplash-inducing. At its worst, The Clearing isn’t quite sure what it’s meant to be, falling into genre tokenization. The early-thirties period Wolf Alice is channeling here is a maze of contradictions and nowhere-leading paths, even when they paint a scene with practiced hands. The raucous pop-rock of the group’s twenties clearly no longer translates, leaving The Clearing with only the tabula rasa of its title to hang onto.
Miranda Wollen is a former Paste Music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.
