{"id":165993,"date":"2025-08-22T08:10:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T08:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/165993\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T08:10:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T08:10:12","slug":"the-clearing-review-perfect-for-blondie-and-kate-bush-fans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/165993\/","title":{"rendered":"The Clearing review \u2014 perfect for Blondie and Kate Bush fans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historically, rock stars don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s follow-up to 2021\u2019s Blue Weekend<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more music reviews, interviews and guides on what to listen to next<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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. \u201cI must be a narcissist,\u201d sings Ellie Rowsell, deftly pre-empting any critics, \u201cGod knows that I can\u2019t resist\/ To make a song and dance about it.\u201d Despite the self-deprecation, it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

The overt high drama is an easy sell. Bloom Baby Bloom, a furious kiss-off to a useless man, starts like Kate Bush\u2019s The Dreaming before swooning into Blondie raptures. Bread Butter Tea Sugar\u2019s Suzi Quatro glam advocates against making sensible choices, while Leaning Against the Wall exemplifies this album\u2019s 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\u2019s ambiguities; The Sofa, the flipside of Blue Weekend\u2019s hedonistic Delicious Things, explores the duvet-day overlap between contentment, resignation and inertia. <\/p>\n

The album\u2019s 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. \u201cI wanna age with excitement\/ Feel my world expand,\u201d she sings, swerving I-will-wear-purple platitudes, \u201cGo grey and feel delighted\/ Don\u2019t just look sexy on a man.\u201d It sounds fragile, but it\u2019s all steel. <\/p>\n

\u2022 Wolf Alice interview: \u2018We realised how cool it is to play a gig\u2019<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Occasionally it becomes airless, the band\u2019s skill locking these songs into place even as they express doubt and contradiction; there are no intriguing gaps, no precarious wobble. Still, it\u2019s an admirable corrective to the often pervasive idea that artists \u2014 particularly female artists \u2014 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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