‘I’m quite private... why am I airing my dirty laundry?’

Fresh from working on the forthcoming Wolf Alice album ‘The Clearing’, frontwoman Ellie Rowsell and the band tell Adam White about freakouts and speaking up about Palestine

- By Adam White

Ellie Rowsell, the mercurial, leather-clad frontwoman of Britain's foremost guitar band Wolf Alice, is curled up on the edge of a record label's sofa and pondering why she writes the things she does. “When a song is born of personal experience, you think you're protected by the fact that you're making art or whatever,” she says, through rubs of her eyes. “But you’re not. I’ve had people ask us, ‘Oh, is this song about her boyfriend?’. And it’s really frightening and scary. I had a big freakout about it. I’m a private person - why am I airing my dirty laundry? And because it’s a song, you have to make it a bit over the top and exaggerate what’s happened to you, but then that makes you feel like you’re being a drama queen. Even if I think I’m protecting myself by calling it art.”

It may be inescapable. There’s a naked emotionality to many of Wolf Alice’s best-known songs, from the sneaky rage of 2021's florid “Safe from Heartbreak (if you never fall in love)” (“I ain’t a plaything/ To make life exciting/ You fucked with my feelings”), to the brutal honesty of 2017’s “Don’t Delete the Kisses”, with its airy chants of “What if it’s not meant for me? Love”. But the point, she says - slanted, stretching and suddenly self-admonishing in an oh-god-I’m-not-making-any-sense sort of way - is that she’s come to understand that it’s not too much of a big deal. “Songs are true and not true, do you know what I mean?” She coughs.

The discussion is gendered, too, adds the band’s bassist Theo Ellis, dressed in a denim jacket, his hair peroxide blonde. “For a guy, it’s like a ‘forlorn love song’ rather than ‘a breakup song’,” he says. “It’s always semi-positive vocabulary that’s attributed to it.”