Wolf Alice NEW HORIZONS

On new album The Clearing, Wolf Alice have found the sweet spot in paring back their ideas and pushing the best to the forefront, as they enter their most confident, self-assured era yet

- BY TARA JOSHI

ELLIE ROWSELL IS ON THE FLOOR IN A LEATHER ONE-PIECE, straddling a wind machine like she’s channelling Stevie Nicks. As they watch their bandmate’s dark hair fanning out behind her, Joel Amey, Joff Oddie and Theo Ellis — each dressed in extreme amounts of denim — beam proudly, cheering Rowsell on and taking pictures with their phones.

Lately, Wolf Alice have been thinking about the mythology of being in a band. It checks out: the beloved north London four-piece have been together for well over a decade now - being in any job that long leads to reflection. Your thirties often involve pauses where you check in on where you're at, how you're spending your time, and whether you're actually happy.

“We were playing with the idea of really owning being in a band,” explains bassist Ellis the week after the shoot, when discussing the promo images that have started teasing their way around the internet in the days before we meet — including one of him in a leather jacket studded with the words ‘Wolf Alice’. Perched somewhat awkwardly on a stool in the band’s current rehearsal space in Wembley (which, he deadpans, looks like a sixth-form college), Ellis continues: “The iconography of a band is guitars and leather and all those kinds of things. Obviously, everyone has done this before, but I think we wanted to play up to those stereotypes in a slightly more fun, reverential way [...], kind of owning some of those totemic things that you associate with bands. And I think there’s a playful, fun thing in the 70s when you see some people doing it where it’s, like, not taking yourself so seriously.”