Wolf Alice - The Clearing

The British quartet’s fourth studio record arrives like a lavish stage production — an arresting performance you can’t tear your eyes from. The Clearing is yet another testament to the protean brilliance of Wolf Alice.

It’s been four years since the band roared into both the UK and international spotlight with Blue Weekend, their third album and a career-defining breakthrough. That record didn’t just land them their first #1 on the UK charts and a BRIT Award; it was widely hailed as one of 2021’s most essential releases.

With expectations sky-high, Wolf Alice needed a bold re-entry — and they delivered. Now signed to RCA and Columbia, the group unveiled “Bloom Baby Bloom” in May 2025, the lead single from The Clearing. Glittering and relentless, it reframed Ellie Rowsell not as a coy indie darling, but as a swaggering, irrepressible glam-rock luminary. The track brims with kinetic energy, while Rowsell’s voice — sliding effortlessly from fragile birdsong to feral growl — feels like one of the most commanding performances of her career.

Much of The Clearing, however, drifts into softer terrain, flirting with ’70s soft-rock à la Fleetwood Mac and tipping its hat to krautrock’s hypnotic pulse — the very textures that endeared King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard to their cult audience. On “White Horses”, Joel Amey takes the rare turn as lead vocalist, while Rowsell tears through the choruses, transforming the track into something like the rowdiest rodeo you’ve ever stumbled into.

“Leaning Against the Wall” pivots dramatically, blossoming from an intimate acoustic sketch into something grandiose and theatrical. Rowsell towers over the arrangement, her voice echoing like cathedral bells before the rest of the band joins in a choral crescendo. “Just Two Girls” channels the spectral grace of Joni Mitchell, but filters it through a queer lens: the song’s narrative of barroom confidences and stolen kisses in the park unfolds so cinematically it practically projects itself onto the screen of your imagination.

At its core, The Clearing is an album about love, self-examination, and the disorienting act of locating oneself in the present moment. The devastatingly introspective “The Sofa” epitomizes this, with Rowsell’s lyrical precision cutting so deeply that her private revelations feel strangely universal. On “Play It Out”, she wrestles for the first time with questions of family and motherhood — the kind often lobbed by nosy relatives across holiday tables. Driven largely by piano, it’s her most unguarded and vulnerable performance on the record.

One of the defining traits that sets The Clearing apart from Wolf Alice’s previous releases is its sheer studio-mindedness. Where earlier records thrived as finely honed artifacts of an indie label’s roster, here the band sounds expansive, almost panoramic. Much of that credit belongs to Greg Kurstin — the veteran pop architect behind a staggering number of mainstream hits. His presence feels less like a surprise than an inevitability: Kurstin’s gift lies in adapting to artists of every stripe, and under his guidance Wolf Alice no longer come across as a scrappy indie concern that caught a lucky break. Instead, they project themselves as a stadium-ready Rock Band — in the best, most elevated sense of the term.

Over the course of their decade-long career, Wolf Alice have inhabited countless guises, shapeshifting across genres with fearless abandon. Yet the throughline has always been their devotion to authenticity and their relentless evolution, both as musicians and as individuals. The Clearing may not be their loudest statement, but its pivot toward intimacy is a daring one, reaffirming Wolf Alice’s status as one of the most vital rock bands of our time. Perhaps even the very best.

8.5/10