If you’re an indie rock band, especially a British one, and you make it big, it’s probably because of That Song. The one you play at every show; the one people’s parents know. You don’t like this song anymore, if you ever did—it’s not daring musically or lyrically, nor particularly difficult to perform. When you play it, it’s with an air of faux reluctance, of being above it all. You might not even bother singing—the crowd is doing it for you.
Wolf Alice don’t, at time of writing, have this song. Their biggest to date is “Don’t Delete the Kisses,” but if that’s naïve it’s self-consciously so. Crowd-friendly grungy turns, like debut single “Fluffy”—“I’d sell you my soul just to get me somewhere”—are far too honest to come off as arrogant. There’s no prototypical Wolf Alice song because all their best are about reaching beyond the self, beyond home (London, North), maybe toward someone, maybe just taking a leap, always measuring the distance between what you are and what you could choose to be. Autofiction and Miranda July have, appropriately, come up in press for the band’s new record, The Clearing. But not every experiment can be a revelation, and high aspirations have left past albums feeling a little patchy.
The stakes for this fourth LP, then, are the same as they’ve been since the first: adored locally, incredible live; could this album make them huge? Well, it’s a glitzier production than any past release, but it’s sometimes unsatisfying in the way shadow puppets are: big, strong shapes missing an essential depth. Opener “Thorns”—rich, bitter—continues the self-inquiry with melodrama, strings, and a looping refrain about making “a song and dance about it.” “Bloom Baby Bloom” is higher-energy, more shrink-wrapped than you’d expect from the band, but grounded by Ellie Rowsell’s acidic singing. There are grunts, a soft count-in, a snarl; the song is wearing out its own ambition, a theme for the whole album, but the sentiment has its wings clipped. The song’s sharpest couplet—“Look at me trying to play it hard/I’m so sick and tired of trying to play it hard”—to cite the band itself, isn’t loud enough.
Producer Greg Kurstin’s work with Adele explains all the piano, but he’s also co-written and produced the sorts of pop songs that play with indie rock fans: You can hear the relentless play-punch of “Famous” by Charli XCX all over The Clearing, and the funky ease of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Boy Problems.” Both of those Kurstin productions bumped shoulders with Wolf Alice on my teenage playlists.
