Cover Feature Wolf Alice: Park Life

“Wolf Alice is everything,” says Theo, picking up the same thread. “It’s all of our lives, completely, and I think to be static would affect us emotionally, and artistically, and it would spill out into everything. If we didn’t try and do all these different things, then maybe it would please someone, maybe piss someone off, but it would affect us most fundamentally. And that dynamic is so important; the privilege of being able to do this for a long time is the privilege to keep exploring your artistic curiosity in these incredible environments that we’ve found ourselves in. Exercising that to its full potential is the most important thing to me.”

This time around, artistic curiosity led the band into more widescreen territory, ruminating on existential notions of purpose and personal fulfillment (‘Play It Out’), making peace with your flaws (‘Thorns’), and finding belonging (‘White Horses’) via swelling organic textures and ‘70s soft-rock warmth. Loosely bound by its eponymous concept - an evocation of the growing self-assurance that comes with age - ‘The Clearing’ finds the four confident and wholly committed to the sound, trading the coming-of-age scuzz of their early days for airy, expansive arrangements and cleaner, nowhere-to-hide production. If ‘Bros’ is their evergreen ode to the fierce love between childhood best mates, then ‘Just Two Girls’ is its spiritual sibling, an equally poignant take on the significance of female friendship, but penned from an inherently more mature perspective.

“Maybe it’s like every time you put out new work, you’re born again a little bit,” says Ellie, musing on the parallels between aging both as a person, and as an artist. “I think it should feel like the beginning every time you put out a new album. That’s maybe the beauty of doing work like that - it goes in cycles instead of just feeling older and older. You kind of press refresh, and it has its own little lifeline.

“And it’s maybe a bit too simplified to [say] ‘we’re at a period in our lives where everything’s great’ - we’ve all got different lives, and that can’t really be true,” she continues, referencing the record’s blue-sky title. “But musically, I think the name ‘The Clearing’ was [chosen] because at the time [of writing], we were into a lot of music that wasn’t necessarily dark - it didn’t have that kind of anxious tension to it that a lot of rock music has, or that a lot of music that we previously liked has. We were kind of just seeking out music that didn’t make us feel like shit.”

Cliched it may be, but teen angst is a trope for a reason; perhaps, we suggest, everyone undergoes a similar shift as they grow up (the adult world serves up more than enough storms to weather, after all). “Mmm,” Ellie murmurs curiously, “yeah, I guess so. And I think it’s brave too; we always say it’s harder to write a cheerful song than a miserable song, maybe because of the notion that people will get scared to be cheesy or something. I think [with ‘The Clearing’] we wanted to challenge ourselves, and it’s a challenge to write rock songs that don’t necessarily go so hard or dwell in pain and angst, you know?”

And on their fourth full-length, Wolf Alice’s commitment to sunnier musical climes (coupled with Ellie’s truly unshackled powerhouse vocal range) also conjures a closer proximity to pop - something some would still receive with a level of cynicism or snobbery. As a band who’ve long been at the vanguard of British indie, walking that sonic tightrope is itself no mean feat. “Yeah, totally,” Ellie nods. “I think maybe people think that when you go for a more pop thing, you’re just simplifying things for yourself or doing the easy option, but it’s so hard to write a pop song.” She chuckles: “Before, I always had some kind of notion that it was simple music, or easy…”

“I think it’s especially hard if you’re working in a group,” Joff notes, “because pop music is kind of typified, right?” Discussing the concept in terms of “really succinct music that does exactly what it’s supposed to do in quite a short period of time”, he points out that “if you’ve got four people working for two years on 40 minutes worth of music that’s trying to do that, [then] restraint is a huge part of the process.” A case of killing their darlings and refining their design, then, the writing process for ‘The Clearing’ saw the band navigate “a really big learning curve” to add yet another string to their bow. One thing Wolf Alice have never been short of is ideas; now, though, their aim is surer than ever. The best, you sense, may well be yet to come.

Four albums and over a decade in, we’d agree that they’ve somewhat outgrown the ‘new band’ badging, but her words nevertheless do unwittingly allude to why Wolf Alice are so enduringly beloved. For anyone who caught them on the cusp of their breakthrough, there’s always been a sense of kinship at play - a classmate-like camaraderie wherein audiences weren’t just observers, but corner-fighting stakeholders in their success.

That’s just one way of saying ‘you were so shit!’” Ellie grins, as the others laugh. “I think if you’d seen us in the early days, you’d have seen us bomb a lot, and then maybe you’d root for us.” But even now, that same air of familiarity and sweaty-ceilinged immediacy is still in tact: Joff emphasises that they’re not “this enormous mega band” and still play “venues of all different sizes” (‘The Clearing’, for example, was launched from Camden’s Dublin Castle); and, as anyone who caught them on last year’s UK tour can attest, arenas don’t always equate to impersonality. Armed with little more than a megaphone, a rotating platform, and an industrial-sized spangly curtain, they stepped up their staging without straying towards gimmicks, creating a show that was at once arresting and authentic.

“We played a bunch of warm up and smaller shows [before ‘The Clearing’ tour],” recalls Ellie. “It was a 100, 200, cap room, and these two guys said: ‘well I don’t want to see you at The O2 - that’s shit, I don’t go to arena shows’. Why would you not want to see a band that you love do something in a different space? That’s so exciting. To keep things going, you do need some challenges, and a challenge was to play that [venue] in a way that feels right for us as a band - as an indie band, if that’s what we are.” She continues: “It was about acknowledging that we’re playing a huge space; how is this going to be fun for the people at the back, as well as the people at the front? But also how do you retain intimacy? That’s going to be one of the craziest things I’m ever going to do - we’re not going to just rock up and play.”

Safe to say, the people of Finsbury Park are in for a treat. “They do make you quite nervous, those gigs,” Theo grins, “but they are uniquely special, because there’s that little percent more of yourself in you if you know your mum’s there, or that person you went to school with that thought you were an idiot. These people have watched you grow. We really did cut our teeth playing absolutely every venue around here, so that scalable journey within London is really unique. A North London homecoming outdoor show: it’s proper bucket list.”

Do they have any surprises up their sleeves? “The only way you can find out is through buying tickets and attending the concert,” he deadpans. “It will be… very interesting if you do that.” “That’s what we’re gonna say when we come out on stage: ‘are you ready for a *very interesting* show?’” Ellie laughs. “I didn’t say fun!” Joel quips. “I didn’t say good!” she rejoins. “I said INTERESTING,” Theo declares. You heard it here first: whatever Wolf Alice have got in store this summer, it’s sure to be very memorable indeed.

Wolf Alice play Finsbury Park on Sunday 5th July 2026. 

Tags: Cover Features, Features, From The Magazine, May 2026, Wolf Alice