When Ellery Roberts announced, “WU LYF is dead to me,” in late 2012, it wasn’t just the best possible outcome for the Manchester band’s legacy; it was the only one. Released a year and a half prior, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain was a debut of unwieldy philosophical and musical underpinnings—post-Occupy agitprop, Afro-pop guitars, a pipe organ and a guy who sang in Tom Waits Simlish, an antagonism to the UK press that the UK press couldn’t stop writing about—bound together by the urgency and energy of four young men who valued martyrdom as the ultimate form of rock’n’roll mythmaking. And so for the next 14 years, they were beloved like so many doomed revolutionaries who put themselves at the front of the insurgency so they wouldn’t have to deal with the committee meetings and paperwork that comes after. Treasured memories of “We Bros” and “Spitting Blood” and the last gasps of blog-rock hype could remain forever intact, uncomplicated by anything as mundane as a pretty good second album. A decade and a half years later, A Wave That Will Never Break throws a hitch in WU LYF’s pyrrhic reputation: a great second album.
And by great, I mean, “big or immense.” For the second time, the opener (“Love Your Fate”) plays on the band’s acronymic name in pursuit of a theme song that transcends the merely anthemic. After a fake-out fade-in, WU LYF find a new row of cheap seats to aim for every 30 seconds or so—splicing a military drum roll into the chorus before the harmonies kick in; shouting “build it all up” and hammering a kick drum on every accent of “BURN. IT. BACK. DOWN”; and, of course, the call-and-response coda for anyone yet convinced. While all of their Big, Evangelical Rock Music countrymen of the early 2010s pivoted to downsized electro pop, padding out the NME-beloved epics that got them to Glastonbury, WU LYF have barely altered their template; “Love Your Fate” ends up sounding like the past 40 years of arena-ready alt rock and, for that reason, utterly novel in 2026.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The ensuing six songs stretch from five to nearly 11 minutes, and Roberts speaks only in terms of unforgettable fires, hurricanes and tidal waves, sleeping in the gutter and dreaming of the stars; the album ends with a closing-credits piano ballad expressing a unified WU LYF theory of everything. WU LYF’s ambitions have not abated in the slightest since Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, an album that eased its path towards the rafters with cathedral reverb sourced from an actual abandoned church. They’ve just become more clarified, stripping away the booming echo that once obscured that group’s limber musicianship, while Roberts has sheared the most jagged nodes from his trachea and, with them, a language of completely unprecedented vowel sounds. If they’re still self-identifying as “heavy pop,” a convincing grasp of funk, soul, and maximum R&B helps lighten the load (only the thuggish, sluggish throwback “Robe of Glory” slows the momentum).
