Wolf Alice - Don’t Delete The Kisses

Considering it’s vying for the title of ‘Most Popular Topic in Music,’ that old chesnut love is surprisingly difficult to write about; especially with a sharp-edged knife that cuts through soppiness and gets to the core, honest and amusingly self-aware at the same time. Enter ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’.

Wolf Alice’s latest newie shows technicolour, cinematic ambition. Vivid and super-wide-screen, neon traces and the haze of a whiskey-soaked evening peer in through the steamed up taxi windows that race through the blocks of a city, Ellie Rowsell letting her inner monologue tumble out unedited as she falls in - or rather stumbles into - love. “I like you, and I’ll never let it show,” she announces stubbornly early on, any hint metaphor or filter binned off from the beginning. Later on, she’s mocking her own infactuation. “I look at your picture and I smile. How awful’s that?” she simpers. “I’m like a teenage girl, I might as well write all over my notebook that you ‘rock my world!” And then, swerving the whole thing around in a quiet upending, she adds “you do, you really do.”

In the same way that ‘Yuk Foo’ perfectly bottled rage, ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ does the same, but down the tenderest end of the spectrum. Swig on the love potion, everyone. Wolf Alice have pulled a blinder.