Wolf Alice, Blue Weekend
Dirty Hit
Wolf Alice are revered – their last release, Visions of a Life, won them a coveted Mercury Prize, they’re renowned as indie darlings with a sharp, ethereal live performance, and their third album Blue Weekend is one of the most anticipated releases of the year so far. How do you meet expectations that are so high? In the case of Blue Weekend, elegantly and effortlessly. The record is Wolf Alice to the core, a concentrate of their intricate dreamscape of a sound that magnifies and draws a hazy veil across it in one sweep of a synth – it follows the third album trajectory of challenging the band’s longtime troupe of adoring fans, but it’s also introspectively challenging. Wolf Alice have produced some of the most stunning, ambitious music of their career.
Across a handful of singles, Wolf Alice prepared us well for Blue Weekend to be something more mature, more otherworldly than what they’ve shared with us so far. The Last Man On Earth led the way with numinous grandeur, a tone continued on the intimate swell of No Hard Feelings and the flickering falsetto of How Can I Make It Ok? – but the stomp of Smile, with its deliciously biting refrain of “wind her up, and this honey bee stings”, was a reminder of the power that lies in the underbelly of Wolf Alice’s more restrained moments. Blue Weekend is a record of restraint all over, a bow and arrow pulled all the way back to breaking point making for songs that are tense, painstaking, delicate, and urgent.
Much of the album does fall into the more shimmering side of Wolf Alice’s sound, all striking slow-burn and production casting a sheen over the deceivingly simple-sounding instrumentation (though once you untangle the silver-spun threads of each track’s texture, it becomes evident that it’s far from simple). Ellie Rowsell’s voice expertly ebbs and flows, rarely reaching the magnetic screech she does on some of Wolf Al’s earlier fan-favourites, but displaying a whole new type of magic. The murmur of second track Delicious Things’s verses push up against the choral crescendo of the choruses in a way that fits flawlessly in with the track’s nonchalant storytelling; similarly, late highlight Feeling Myself’s verses are laidback and chillingly cool, before the chorus blazes in across the groove of the bass to turn the track into something mightier than you might have predicted. Rowsell is crystal-clear as ever, utterly controlled start to finish, and beautiful.
There’s a lot of heartbreaking, vulnerable reflection about love and relationships on Blue Weekend, which it’s very easy to overcook. But in moments that on any other record could feel cliché, Wolf Alice pull off by nestling them amongst such cinematic magic – you can’t help but see their place in the story of Blue Weekend. The endearing, country-ish (acoustic-guitar-led, vocal-harmony-laden) Safe From Heartbreak (if you never fall in love) feels like a meditative respite from the grandeur of the rest of the album, and easily finds its place. Likewise, the album’s bookends – The Beach and The Beach II – let the credits roll, respectively introducing and giving one final swell of emotional intensity to frame Blue Weekend with gorgeous enormity.
Smile is the album’s attitude peak, Rowsell spitting and crowing as powerfully as she’s ever done on what Wolf Alice fans have already adopted as an anthem, and this characteristically commanding attitude does make unexpected appearances even on songs that may seem relaxed or gentle. Lipstick On The Glass’s moody sighs, Feeling Myself’s formidable cool (had to!), and most notably, Play The Greatest Hits. The latter is Blue Weekend’s resident noise machine – for any snarky, pint-wielding fan who was going to complain that ‘Wolf Alice just don’t make bangers like they used to’ while playing Fluffy and Giant Peach on repeat, the band have already given their answer, and it’s a resolute, tongue-in-cheek Fuck You. As the music and the careening vocal line screams out that Wolf Alice have still got a three-minute punk song as good as any well within them, Rowsell’s lyrics cry out against the empty spiral of fame and the unsatisfying ends it brings.
The real key of why Blue Weekend is so brilliant, maybe, is how self-aware Wolf Alice are on it. Whether it’s the incision of tracks like Play The Greatest Hits, the intricacy of the instrumentals in such a way that can only be achieved by a band working in perfect creative symbiosis, or the vast levels of control Wolf Alice nurture in the peaks and dips of the record, it’s almost impossibly tight. Everything is polished and pushed a little further than the easy way out could have left it. It’s Wolf Alice striving for artistry, and hitting every mark and more.
Blue Weekend is out today.
