As she delivers one of the song’s most cutting lines (“ Who are you to ask for anything more/ The only thing you should be asking for is help”), drummer Joel Amey, bassist Theo Ellis and guitarist Joff Oddie enter the stage and gradually lift the track to epic new heights that dip between vintage psych riffs and majestic walls of sound built to fill arenas. Somehow they skirted both pitfalls: Blue Weekend is Wolf Alice’s biggest and most immediately satisfying album cresting shoegaze, woozy classic rock, inventive acoustic songwriting cohered. It’s a different pace for the band – one that puts their singer at the forefront and lets her emotive voice do the work until we enter a grand, powerful second half. It’s not until midway through the song that we get much more than Rowsell’s vocals and a simple piano line. ‘The Last Man On Earth’, though, changes tack. Even EPs ‘Blush’ (2013) and ‘Creature Songs’ (2014) introduced themselves with tracks that made you want to throw yourself headfirst into a sweaty mass of strangers. Their 2015 debut album ‘My Love Is Cool’ had the sludgy swagger of ‘Giant Peach’ and ‘Yuk Foo’ – the first track from their phenomenal 2017 album ‘Visions Of A Life’ – set fire to everything that had come before in a blaze of urgent rock riffs and guttural screams from Rowsell. Usually, the start of a new era for the four-piece is signalled by a storming, moshpit-inciting banger. Wolf Alice have long proven themselves to be one of the best and brightest bands in Britain, but here they give us yet more evidence that they’re still setting the standard for UK music and beyond. It’s sharp, smart songwriting that provides both a critical assessment of humanity’s egotistical impulses and allows us to do the very thing it warns of – finding ourselves in the lyrics and moulding them to fit our worlds. It’s an event that doesn’t escape Rowsell’s of our self-important society: “ Every book you take and you dust off from the shelf/ Has lines between lines between lines that you read about yourself,” she observes. We inject importance into their storylines and lyrics based on how they make us feel about our lives, the lines between whether a piece of art is actually good or just makes us feel seen increasingly blurred. Relatability is big currency in pop culture these days and it’s a common phenomenon for us to interpret songs, books, movies and more based on our own experiences. “ Do you wait for your dancing lessons to be sent from God?” At one point we didn’t think we’d have an album at all, Theo Ellis, their excitable bleach-blond bassist. “ Who are you to ask for anything more?” she questions. Wolf Alice have been on the tip of everyone’s tongue for a good few years now, but they never expected to achieve a number two album with My Love Is Cool let alone in the same week as a pair of spectacular Glastonbury sets. Rowsell says the song is about “the arrogance of humans” and riffs on her feelings about that Vonnegut quote in its opening lines. That is the jump-off point for ‘The Last Man On Earth’, the first track from Wolf Alice’s third album ‘Blue Weekend’, which is due June 11 via Dirty Hit.
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