Historically, rock stars don’t always do well with growing up. Neil Young wrote Sugar Mountain, his song about the terror of turning 20, at 19. When Robert Smith approached his 30th birthday, it resulted in The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration. Watching your age flip over from one decade to another can be a destabilising experience, one that often demands a reckoning, a stock-taking that lies behind The Clearing, Wolf Alice’s follow-up to 2021’s Blue Weekend.

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Yet instead of crumbling into anxiety as their thirties deepen, the London quartet have made this grandly expansive fourth album a show of undeniable strength. Written in Seven Sisters, north London, and recorded in Los Angeles with the blue-chip producer Greg Kurstin, their first album for RCA takes charge from the outset: the audacious Beatles-style rush of Thorns is an opening track that sounds like a curtain-closing finale. “I must be a narcissist,” sings Ellie Rowsell, deftly pre-empting any critics, “God knows that I can’t resist/ To make a song and dance about it.” Despite the self-deprecation, it’s a mission statement: Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, drummer Joel Amey and bassist Theo Ellis exist (as Pulp might say) to turn the stuff of their lives into universally resonant music.

The overt high drama is an easy sell. Bloom Baby Bloom, a furious kiss-off to a useless man, starts like Kate Bush’s The Dreaming before swooning into Blondie raptures. Bread Butter Tea Sugar’s Suzi Quatro glam advocates against making sensible choices, while Leaning Against the Wall exemplifies this album’s rangy aesthetic reach, coming in like a folk song, going out in dreampop ecstasies. Yet Wolf Alice are also alert to more nebulous states. The soft-rocking Just Two Girls navigates friendship’s ambiguities; The Sofa, the flipside of Blue Weekend’s hedonistic Delicious Things, explores the duvet-day overlap between contentment, resignation and inertia.

The album’s emotional crux, however, is Play It Out, a hushed piano antidote to Sugar Mountain, where Rowsell stares down the future: a child-free life, inevitable loss, relentless passing time. “I wanna age with excitement/ Feel my world expand,” she sings, swerving I-will-wear-purple platitudes, “Go grey and feel delighted/ Don’t just look sexy on a man.” It sounds fragile, but it’s all steel.

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Occasionally it becomes airless, the band’s skill locking these songs into place even as they express doubt and contradiction; there are no intriguing gaps, no precarious wobble. Still, it’s an admirable corrective to the often pervasive idea that artists — particularly female artists — owe audiences messy confessionals. Assured and ambitious even at its most untrammelled, The Clearing is the work of a band who have grown up to know exactly what they are doing. (RCA)
★★★★☆

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