Throwback Review

10/10

*Part of our throwback album review series.

Looking back now, The Clearing feels like the album where Wolf Alice stopped trying to prove themselves to anybody.

By the time the record arrived in 2025, the band had already survived the strange modern trajectory from indie darlings to Mercury Prize winners to one of Britain’s few genuinely arena-capable alternative bands. What made The Clearing so compelling though was that it resisted the temptation to become bigger for the sake of scale alone.

Instead, Wolf Alice made a record that sounded emotionally expansive rather than commercially inflated.

The album thrives in contradiction. It is heavy without collapsing into aggression. Intimate without becoming fragile. Atmospheric without disappearing into abstraction. Across the record, the band move effortlessly between distorted guitar-driven chaos and moments of near silence, somehow making both feel equally powerful.

Ellie Rowsell delivers one of the strongest vocal performances of her career here because she understands restraint better than most frontwomen working in alternative music. She never oversells emotion. The quieter moments often land harder precisely because they are held back.

Tracks like “Bloom Baby Bloom” and “White Horses” showcase the band at their most cinematic, building tension gradually rather than chasing instant hooks. Meanwhile “The Sofa” strips everything back entirely, revealing a quieter emotional exhaustion sitting underneath much of the album’s core.

There is also a maturity to the songwriting that separates The Clearing from earlier Wolf Alice releases. The band sound less interested in genre experimentation for its own sake and more focused on atmosphere, emotional pacing and cohesion. Shoegaze textures, indie rock, dream pop and grunge influences still exist throughout, but they are woven together naturally rather than presented as stylistic flexes.

Importantly, the record still sounds human.

In an era increasingly dominated by algorithm-friendly production and hyper-sterile pop perfection, The Clearing allowed roughness, ambiguity and emotional discomfort to remain intact. That gave the album weight and longevity.

A year on, it already feels like one of those records that will quietly age better than many louder, more commercially dominant releases around it.

Wolf Alice did not reinvent themselves with The Clearing.

They deepened. And often, that is where the truly great bands separate themselves from the merely fashionable ones. One of the finest band of our era.