Wolf Alice

BOILERPLATE

North London quartet Wolf Alice first emerged in 2013 with the bruised euphoria of their debut album My Love Is Cool, which featured the Grammy-nominated 'Moaning Lisa Smile.' 2018's follow up Visions Of A Life cemented their rise with a Mercury Music Prize win, before the precious hurt of 2022's Blue Weekend and its resultant number 1 in the UK album charts and Brit Award for Best Group.

August 22nd, 2025 will see the release of Wolf Alice's fourth album The Clearing via their new global label home, Sony Music. Written in Seven Sisters and recorded in LA with Grammy-winning producer Greg Kurstin, The Clearing reveals where Wolf Alice stand sonically in 2025, delivering a supremely confident collection of songs bursting with ambition, ideas and emotion. Both playful and serious, ironic and straight-talking, The Clearing is a progressive shift from a band whose exploration of love, loss and human connection has already articulated the coming-of-age experience for a whole generation.

If Fleetwood Mac wrote an album today in North London, you'd get somewhere close to this run of effortlessly grand tracks, each as distinct as the last. Sonically, there is no waste, no fuss, with more authoritative melodies than the band has ever crafted before. This is a new beginning, and each of the band feels it as keenly as listeners will.

The new era is led by the soaring, jubilant first single 'Bloom Baby Bloom' and their latest release, 'The Sofa' — a radical and unflinchingly honest piano ballad that captures the quiet peace of growing older without regret. A psychological portrait wrapped in daydreams, 'The Sofa' reflects the band's growing lyrical depth and emotional scope, and is already a fan favourite following Wolf Alice's pivotal performance at Primavera Festival in June.

Across their career, Wolf Alice have toured the world multiple times on sold-out headline tours, gracing major festival stages and supporting an array of key artists along the way. Their return to the stage this summer has been met with widespread acclaim, including a history-defining sunset slot on Glastonbury's Other Stage — a triumphant set that balanced fan favourites like 'Bros' and 'Don't Delete The Kisses' with euphoric new material from The Clearing. The fun is set to continue with a huge headline tour scheduled for the end of 2025.

The Clearing will be released on Sony Music on August 22nd 2025.

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FULL BIO

Wolf Alice have come a long way since the North London quartet first emerged in 2013 as a young band holding a mirror up to their own emerging generation. Today, Wolf Alice's fourth album The Clearing finds them at the peak of their powers, grown into a band of generational importance. The Clearing is a confident collection of songs bursting with ambition, ideas and emotion. While the bruised euphoria of their debut My Love Is Cool, which featured the Grammy-nominated 'Moaning Lisa Smile,' both captured and perfectly soundtracked the experience of youth first cutting their musical teeth, 2018's follow up Visions Of A Life cemented their rise with a Mercury Music Prize, before the precious hurt of 2022's Blue Weekend and its resultant Brit Award for Best Group. In the process, lead singer Ellie Rowsell has grown into a storytelling icon, weaving cautionary tales of how your twenties will hurt you, but in valuable ways. Three years later and with new album The Clearing, Wolf Alice have transcended the trend cycle to arrive at a collection of songs that is truly timeless.

"With 'The Clearing,' I visualised just a moment of peace," says Ellie Rowsell of the new album. She's settled into the end of a rehearsal studio sofa, her legs pretzelled up underneath her, facing the rest of the band who listen as she explains her vision. "I also think if you come into a clearing in the woods, it's never at the end of the woods. You're not out of the woods yet but you have relief." The Clearing encapsulates that feeling of having survived the freewheeling hunt for identity in your 20s. This metaphor is captured in the album's psychological portrait 'The Sofa,' a half-lamenting, half-shrugging at everything you might never be. "Didn't make it out to California / Where I thought I might clean the slate / Feels a little like I'm stuck in Seven Sisters / North London, or England / And maybe that's ok," Rowsell sings.

Both playful and serious, ironic and straight-talking, The Clearing is a progressive shift from a band whose exploration of love, loss and human connection has already articulated the coming-of-age experience for a whole generation. It's a classic pop/rock album that nods to the '70s while remaining rooted firmly in the present. If Fleetwood Mac wrote an album today in North London, you'd get somewhere close to these 11 effortlessly grand tracks, each as distinct as the last. Sonically, there is no waste, no fuss, with more authoritative melodies than the band has ever crafted before. This is a new beginning, and each of the band feels it as keenly as listeners will.

The first big evolution came with the songwriting process. Rowsell had been inspired by the art of crafting songs she witnessed in Peter Jackson's Beatles docuseries, Get Back. "I think that the timing of that coming out just when we'd finished touring made me feel excited to be in a band rather than get on my computer and make a beat," she says. Everything they had known about writing an album, the instinctive way that the band had so far synchronized together to make songs, had to be abandoned too. "I wanted to get in a room and write things down on a piece of paper." What good could building layers of synths or writing into a screen do in this uncharted territory? "Limitations are hugely creatively inspiring," says guitarist Joff Oddie, enthused by the memory of discovering this new rhythm. "We needed to be challenged and if you've been a band for as long as we have, you're forced to decide if you want to stay the same or try something different."

Ellie's writing process organically transformed in line with these converging variables. She put a piano in her North London home and as an instrument she was less familiar with, it became a fresh canvas to create on, a learning curve that allowed songs to mature over several weeks or even months. "This different process meant where I'd naturally go to a certain chord or whatever, I'd be like, is that really the best I can do?" expands Rowsell. "Then I'd come back to it and try something better in a few weeks, in which time I might have learned something new because now I was listening to other people's songs with a songwriter's head screwed on." Where before she always thought her first idea must be the best, for The Clearing she forced herself to consider it was the second, tenth or fiftieth idea that might just be her strongest.

Since they were so focused on the craft of songwriting, their core reference became the 1970s. It was a great time, they assert, when the DNA of the biggest pop music in the world was consistently focussed on the art of the song. "We didn't want to make a vintage album or a pastiche," says Ellis. This was to be the past reimagined with the energy of the present, a fantasy blending of American and British folklore, a modern classic infused with a vintage spirit. More than anything Rowsell wanted to have fun. Blue Weekend had been an emotionally scarring album for her; this time she wanted it to be different. "Could the music mirror the play of live performance and celebrate good things?" wondered Rowsell. "Rather than the things that I have always gravitated towards, the stuff that is harder to make sense of or is painful?" This was a challenge for the entire band; "Writing a happy song you don't want to turn off," remarks drummer Joel Amey, "is very hard."

To complete the bulk of the songwriting process they really did get into a room and write the album down on one long scroll of paper, multiple meters long and donated by Rowsell's dad. The result, later recorded over three months in Los Angeles with legendary pop producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Miley Cyrus, Lily Allen), is a new vision of what a Wolf Alice album should be. The two Pole Stars in the production room were the songwriting and the piano; Kurstin's pianist abilities expanded the charm and depth of what they'd already created. "He'd listen to a song a couple of times and be able to play top down, start to finish, all the chord changes without knowing what the chords were," Amey marvels. When Rowsell and Kurstin played in unison: "It killed me," he says. "It was so gorgeous." Given Kurstin's respected long years in the industry, he had a collection of old mics and tapes that he never gets to use: with Wolf Alice he was delighted to be able to play around with them as much as they were. As such, The Clearing sounds — as they had hoped for themselves from the very start — completely fun.

The record opens with the dramatic sweep of 'Thorns,' a piano-led ballad and the first song written after Blue Weekend. "Ooh I must be a narcissist / God knows that I can't resist / To make a song and dance about it / Maybe I'm a masochist," she monologues, relishing in the absurdity of turning personal pain into art. Reflecting on the deeply personal nature of their previous album, she wondered why she had chosen to expose herself like that. "In my little room, with my little guitar, writing about a boy who dumped me," she laughs. "I thought maybe it was because I'm a narcissist, then realised I was writing a song about being narcissistic. How narcissistic is that?. I thought it was funny and wanted to mirror that in how grand I could make the music." It's a grand entrance with the red velvet curtain lifting to reveal just one woman commanding the stage.

Anything that might be casually defined as indie rock is now just a distant memory. Nor does The Clearing sound like it's particularly keen to live in the '70s; it's Wolf Alice's world, just captured through the decade's subtly faded Kodak memories. And always at the front and centre is Rowsell's poetic storytelling. Whether it's creating tiny tableaus out of huge questions like possible motherhood ('Play It Out') or intimately placing the listener right there in the busy room while she's falling in love ('Leaning Against The Wall'), the subtle force of her writing abilities is fluently impressive.

For the dreamy Californian pop soul of 'Just Two Girls,' Rowsell was inspired by the depth and fun of female friendship, the way conversations with female friends could be so validating (in which other spaces do women hear "you're so right" dozens of times per hang out?). "Tiny epiphanies when she's drinking with me / She likes the way I over-hypothesize the people in the room / Undress my every thought / The way that you can't pay for," she ponders, comparing their conversation to the likes of which you'd have with a therapist.

With its rolling bass riff, 'Bloom Baby Bloom' is a smart de-testosteroned twist on heavy rock. "I wanted a rock song, to focus on the performance element of a rock song and sing like Axl Rose, but to be singing a song about being a woman," Rowsell notes. "I've used the guitar as a shield in the past, playing it has perhaps been some way to reject the 'girl singer in band' trope, but I wanted to focus on my voice as a rock instrument so it's been freeing to put the guitar down and reach a point where I don't feel like I need to prove that I'm a musician."

The Clearing culminates in a gut-punching one-two with 'White Horses' and 'The Sofa,' the final tracks that tie together the thematic questions and references across the album. Before the listener ends on the introspective world-building on 'The Sofa' — the band's metaphorical and literal resting place after so much searching and dreaming — they must journey through the understated psychedelic power of 'White Horses.' The spirited lines in the latter's duet, "Know who I am that's important to me / Do what I can to see the wood from the tree," reveal where Wolf Alice stand sonically in 2025, a band confident in their abilities and utterly free of imposter syndrome. They are able to play, experiment, and laugh through uncharted territory, all while maintaining their unmistakable DNA. The magic of a Wolf Alice record lies with their particular collision of minds; of Ellie, Joff, Theo and Joel trying to make sense of it all.

The Clearing is a portrait of a band standing on the precipice of a new decade in both life and art. Growing beyond youth's rage and insecurity, together, Wolf Alice are unafraid to confront those scars while stepping into the hard-earned reward of self-knowledge.