When the music video for “Bloom Baby Bloom,” the lead single from Wolf Alice’s fourth album, The Clearing, dropped back in May, it was clear that the band was in rare form. The London-based four-piece, who got their start in the early 2010s with their breezy breakout hit “Bros” (and the accompanying album My Love Is Cool), have gone on to become one of the biggest British bands of their generation, receiving rave reviews—as well as a Brit Award for best British group. (Their second record, 2017’s Visions of a Life, also won the prestigious Mercury Prize, while their third, 2021’s Blue Weekend, was their first record to top the UK charts.) With all the success their playful, off-kilter take on indie rock has brought them, why would they want to reinvent the wheel?
Well, because Wolf Alice is not a band that rests on its laurels. Back to that “Bloom Baby Bloom” visual, which kicks off with three of the band’s members—Joff Oddie, Joel Amey, and Theo Ellis—playing the roles of ’70s California rockers to a tee in denim and leather, strutting and strumming their way around an ensemble of dancers in Fame-worthy legwarmers and leotards. Soon, frontwoman Ellie Rowsell sashays her way across the stage in a spangly bodysuit and glitter smeared across her eyes, dragging a chair behind her before launching into a frenzied, Bob Fosse-inspired dance number, wind machines and all. With the video’s glitz and glamour and bombastic sense of spectacle, the band has clearly come a long way from the basement venues and pubs in Camden where they first made their name.
But after 15 years together—and with their new album marking their first release on a major label, after signing with Columbia Records in 2024—why shouldn’t they go bigger, bolder, and brassier? Across The Clearing’s tight 11 tracks, the band showcases every aspect of what makes it so brilliant: the irresistible pop hooks and Rowsell’s instinct for an evocative lyric; the rich, ’70s-inflected sound explored on tracks like “Bread Butter Tea Sugar” and “The Sofa”; their closeness as a group, which is beautifully captured by Amey on “White Horses,” a track on which he takes the spotlight as the lead vocalist. (That bond is in full evidence when the four of them dial in separately to our Zoom call; despite being a little beleaguered from all the promo, they quickly start teasing and joking with each other.)
Here, as the band heads off on tour around the US, they talk to Vogue about the origins of The Clearing as a record, the impressively realized visual world they’ve built around it, and why they finally felt ready to embrace some of the classic tropes of rockstar fashion.
Vogue: When did you first start writing the album? I read that it happened after you signed with Columbia, and moved to a major label for the first time. Did it sort of feel like a clean-slate moment for you?
Joff Oddie: I don’t know about a clean slate, but we definitely felt very excited. It was a new chapter for the band in terms of what we could envision us doing, the kind of network we were going to be working with, the infrastructure we would have moving forward. In terms of the creativity, the excitement just came from within the four of us, as it usually does. Some songs were already floating around, and it was really akin to how we’ve started all our records—we just got together and had a chat about what we wanted to achieve. But we did want to try a slightly different route compared to our previous Wolf Alice writing sessions. On all the early demos, we really homed in on structures, we homed in on chords, and we tried not to rely on the computer, so we ended up with all these production-heavy demos before I’d even sat at a drum kit.
At the beginning of your career, you were putting out records at quite a rapid pace. With The Clearing and Blue Weekend, it feels like you allowed yourselves a bit more time to breathe between them. What do you think having that extra time to play around with things brought to the record?
Oddie: I mean, we put the second record out in a ridiculously short time after the first one. I think we finished touring the first one, went straight into a studio, worked for three months and then went and recorded it, and then we were back on the road. By the time we got to work on Blue Weekend, we needed a bit of a rest. But it’s definitely a luxury that we’re able to spend a little more time diving deeper, which not everyone gets. It’s a privilege to be able to do that, and it was a privilege to be able to do that with Greg Kurstin, who produced the record, and is a very special guy with a wonderful studio.
Tell me a little more about working with Greg. After you’d had those conversations about the direction you wanted to head in with The Clearing, why did he feel like the man for the job?
Ellie Rowsell: I think it was because he’s worked across quite a large range of genres, so it left things open for us. He’s a bit of a chameleon and he can kind of do anything. Plus, we had met him briefly before, and he’s just very nice. He has a nice temperament and has been in lots of bands himself, so he understands the dynamic, which is important to us.
Oddie: He’s got a very British sense of humor as well, which helps.
I read another interview where you spoke about not being afraid to be ambitious this time around, or not seeing ambition as a dirty word. Did Kurstin’s work in the pop music space have anything to do with your decision?
Rowsell: I don’t know—I’m not sure “ambitious” necessarily means making pop music for us. I feel like we’ve always tried to make pop music. Maybe we just failed. [Laughs.]
Oddie: Yeah, we’re just bad at it.
The subject matter of the record covers a lot of the prosaic stuff around entering your 30s, but the sound of the record is, at times, pretty bold and bombastic. Why did you feel you wanted to tell those stories with that more theatrical energy?
Rowsell: I think a lot of the themes throughout the album are about taking stock of what’s around you and finding joy in the little things, and maybe it’s quite fun to sing about those things with a certain bombast, like, “If this is all I’ve got, then let’s really enjoy it and make it great.” The little things are important, and so they need to sound important, really. I feel like that might have been more of a subconscious decision, though.
Oddie: I agree. I think Joel has said this before, but I feel like you can hear each individual’s character in the playing on this record, which is maybe us being more accepting of who we are as musicians—not trying to be something we aren’t, but leaning into our skill set. There’s something very personal about the way that Joel plays drums, or Theo plays bass, or the way that Ellie sings or plays piano and guitar. And I think there’s a kind of self-acceptance to how we’re playing on this record, which feels interesting.
Ellie, you are doing some pretty amazing things vocally on the album, going from a belt to a whisper in the space of a single song. Did you go into the writing process intentionally wanting to try new things with your singing this time around?
Rowsell: I think I’m just trying to keep things fresh for myself. I think when you’ve had less experience, or maybe are younger, you’re worried to try new things in case you lose that sense of identity. Especially with your voice, people who are super-trained often end up sounding the same. And when you know what your identity is as a musician, or as a singer, you feel more confident to explore. I guess that also comes with feeling tired of caring too much about what other people are going to say, and having fun with it. I always say that watching people do karaoke is very inspiring as a singer, because I wish I could do that. I wish I could just enjoy myself when I’m singing, rather than thinking about every aspect of it.
At what point in the recording process did you start mapping out the visual world that was going to surround this album? It’s very striking and fully realized, and it really puts the band front and center for the first time.
Rowsell: I think we spoke about it more so than we’d done before, and from quite early on. In a silly way, we’ve always been like, “What colors do you imagine this album to be?” We’d ask questions like that. And then when it comes closer to the time, and we have more of an understanding of what we’ve made, we’d start talking about visuals properly. One thing we discussed was having the band name on the album cover, just establishing that we really are a band now. Because this album is a bit more playful, we had the confidence that it was the right time to do that. And then once we got Rachel Fleminger Hudson on board, she listened to the album so many times and she sent us all these decks of research and imagery. She really felt that it was important to have our faces in it and for us to be dressing up a little bit. That’s what she saw when she closed her eyes and listened. Rather than it being, “I see this beautiful river,” it was, “But it would be better if you were on it.” That made me personally feel better about doing it.
It certainly looks like you were all having a lot of fun with it all—the dancing and the fashion in the music videos, in particular, looked like a blast.
Theo Ellis: Doing the “Bloom Baby Bloom” video was so much fun. It was a brilliant day. We had some fantastic people on that team: Ryan Heffington, who was the choreographer, and the dancers, many of whom were people who were part of a Holly Blakey piece called Cowpuncher that both Ellie and I saw, and I honestly felt was life-changing. In any performance, people dress up to an extent. It’s part of putting the armor on. It’s a cliché, but I think to unify a band, sometimes you go for the things that are synonymous with rock bands—the leather and the denim and the semi-slicked-back-hair thing as a kind of performance of that confidence. And so it was really fun trying that out for the first time. I really loved the clothes that Gary David Moore, who worked with us on the styling, found to help us assimilate into this new little universe we were making.
Joel Amey: I mean, I agree with everything Theo said. I loved it. I mean, for “Bloom Baby Bloom,” I literally got to sit at the back and watch everyone dance for 12 hours. It was so fun, and it’s one of those things where you really have to pinch yourself, like, “Wow, this is how I get to spend my day.” Ellie is amazing in that video, and I loved the creative experience of it all.
And I imagine it will be a really fun record to perform live. How are you feeling about the tour?
Oddie: It’s been very busy. We’ve spent quite a lot of time working on it behind the scenes, because we’re making a step up—definitely in the UK—to becoming an arena band. And there are lots of new things we need to be thinking about there, and other people that we will be working with to bring the visual elements of it up to that level. So that’s really exciting. But I think that these songs really suit the live environment because so many of them were kind of recorded live. In North America, we’re playing some really iconic venues, like the Brooklyn Paramount in New York. It’s feeling really, really strong.
Will you be bringing any of your Bob Fosse-inspired moves to the stage, Ellie?
Rowsell: One hundred percent not. No one needs to see that, to be quite honest.
Oddie: I’m going to be bringing my Bob Ross-inspired moves, maybe. I’ve been watching Ellie play gigs recently, and she’s definitely in, like, Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan mode. It’s amazing. I feel like there’s a power in this record that’s something we haven’t tapped into previously. You have to hold energy in arenas in a different way, and it can be really hard to do it in a room that big. We’ve been privy to watching people do amazing things in those places on support tours, or even as fans going to see people playing big gigs. So I think we are genuinely relishing the opportunity. I feel like from where I’m standing, this is the most we’ve ever been prepared to play those shows. I can’t wait.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
