Wolf Alice Return with Soft Alternative Pop, Combining a Sense of Maturity with The Clearing
Label: RCA
Released: August 29, 2025
By Krista Spies
Wolf Alice, a band who have been successful in aesthetic presence throughout their discography, return with their fourth studio album, The Clearing. The English indie-rock band brings a soft alternative pop direction as they combine a sense of maturity with a return to the basics. The Clearing, with its quick songs of alternative-pop communion, showcase what simple, strong vocals and precise instrumentals can do as an exploratory piece of music and art.
Beginning with a soulful few piano notes going into synthesized organ notes, “Thorns” serves as a calm wave of an introductory track. Frontwoman Ellie Rowsell mixes graceful singing with a sort-of speaking directly to the listener, bringing in the group’s typical conversational lyric style. The chorus says, “I must be a narcissist. God knows that I can’t resist to make a song and dance about it,” and the song ends with, “Maybe I’m a masochist. The sun goes down, the curtain lifts, and I sing a song,” which gently leads into the rest of the work as a whole.
Second track “Bloom Baby Bloom” immediately allows for more room for fun sonically with a stomping beat and exaggerated tones from Rowsell. The upbeat, cinematic sounds, which include spontaneous drum fills and an interesting piano pattern, almost clash with lyrics of frustration. With occasional groans, short screams and other interjections, the energetic verses satisfy themselves with a turn in mood in the chorus. As she sings, “But I’ll bloom, baby, bloom. Watch me, yeah, you’ll see just what I’m worth,” that frustration turns into self-value and purpose, with a bright instrumental behind it.
Imagery and genuine storytelling play a strong role in the lyricism of The Clearing. “Just Two Girls” describes, as the title tells, an interaction with two women. Their exchange, along with the way the songwriting looks deeper into their behavior, creates almost an entire mythology from the image of the two. “I like the way she chain-smokes incessantly, tiny epiphanies when she’s drinking with me. She likes the way I over-hypothesize,” are repeated lines that immediately tell the listener about these figures as individuals and about the relationship between them.
Fourth track “Leaning Against The Wall” delivers an essential coming-of-age-ness that proves central to the record. We’re eight years past Wolf Alice’s debut album, but as listeners, we are invited through the band’s personal and musical exploration of The Clearing. Excited acoustic guitar strumming and quiet conversation in the background begin the song, but then we get a quiet moment with a now-calm guitar and vocals. Then, we are led to a world of ambience with soft electronic beats and ethereal piano notes.
A low, layered and repetitive voice begins “White Horses” with “‘Music and love have magnetic properties,’ wrote a scholar from the island that they kept from me, and I don’t need to solve my unknown identity, just need an answer to the question in the taxi. My sister paints apathy like blasphemy, but I never thought names deserve such energy. It’s my choice to choose who I embrace as family.” Like in these lines, The Clearing addresses themes of abstract reflection brought to the personal level. Going from high singing, which feels tossed upwards, to that lower, conversational tone categorizes the pre-chorus to chorus movement of “White Horses,” and that sonic action seems to echo the sentiment of reflection and reality.
Wolf Alice released “The Sofa” early on in anticipation of the album. Flowing simply with lively rhyming lines, the listener follows Rowsell on a level of both embracing and rejecting the aforementioned introspection. The lyrics of this ending track are intrinsically human, as they explore contradictions and general feelings of everyday life. They address an exhaustion that comes with growing up—at any age. She repeats, “I love my life, I love my life, but sometimes I just want to…”