Let it be said that Wolf Alice’s ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ is one of the most delightfully bonkers singles of 2025. It opens with a repetitive piano motif as though a minimalist master like Steve Reich had laid the foundations. The drums, bass and percussion enter the fray with tightly composed crispness. The proggier verses find their foil in the grandiloquently anthemic chorus. This segues into the second verse with several pauses, a wild yelp, one tiny blast of lead guitar and a similarly brief drum roll. Vocally, Ellie Rowsell seems to be channelling Kate Bush on one section, a feral riot grrrl the next, and several additional identities over the course of four minutes. Rowsell says she imagined herself as a female Axl Rose. Unafraid to swear in the second line, she uses her lyrics to explore wavering feelings of certitude, insecurity, self-doubt and sod-it defiance.
It is an avant-pop triumph, basically. ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ suggested Wolf Alice were loath to grow blander as they continued to get bigger. Instead, they would strive boldly to stretch themselves and challenge their audience, as true artists should, while still getting played on Greg James’ breakfast show.
It’s therefore painful to report that the same cannot be said for the rest of the Mercury winners’ disappointing fourth album, The Clearing. ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ is the exception, by a monolithic margin, rather than the rule.
Suspicions of this discrepancy were already raised by a second promotional single, ‘The Sofa’. It was as if Wolf Alice felt their festival slots were under threat from The Last Dinner Party and tried to concoct something that might appeal to their rivals’ following of fancy dressed free spirits. ‘The Sofa’ ended up more as a pale imitation. And that’s speaking as someone who already finds The Last Dinner Party paler than Charlie Bigham’s chicken korma. ‘The Sofa’ is positioned as The Clearing’s closing number, underwhelmingly so, seeing as it signs off the 11 tracks with the invitation to a shoulder shrugging “Is that it?”
What went so awry? Did the band members work meticulously on ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ for the greater part of four years and then hurriedly meet the LP deadline by tossing out the by-numbers detritus described below? Did Greg Kurstin, whose production credits include Foo Fighters, Adele, Jonas Brothers and Ellie Goulding, beat the imagination out of the musicians? “You’re on a major label now, and this is 2025. You can’t be messing around, trying to push the boundaries, like David Byrne used to do. We’ve got a warehouse full of empty tote bags to sell in Quarter 2 alone!”
Did management note that ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ peaked at Number 65, so they quickly taped over any other creatively ambitious tracks with material rush-written by The Velvet Sundown’s obedient AI bots? Did everybody involved suddenly find their feet felt colder than Edmund Hillary’s?
Songs including the opener ‘Thorns’ and a later mod plonk called ‘Bread Butter Tea Sugar’ are heavy on the George Martin-indebted orchestration. It implies Wolf Alice are aiming to immediately fill the void left by the now defunct ELO, just as Jeff Lynne once hoped to fill the void left by Gerry & The Pacemakers. Wolf Alice have name-checked Fleetwood Mac as another influence but anybody who’s choosing The Clearing, after a couple of spins, over the richness and eccentricity of Tusk has got looser screws than a written-off rollercoaster.
‘Midnight Song’ is a serviceable folk tune in the Vashti Bunyan mode during which nothing unexpected happens for the full three minutes. Other ballads are fleshed out towards their end with unintrusive textures and strings, with only the faintest echoes of Wolf Alice’s prior pop-end-of-shoegaze effects. One such piece is ‘Leaning Against The Wall’, a country song of quality no greater than those performed by plucky amateurs in open-mic slots across the land. ‘Play It Out’ follows the same path, only that one starts as a candlelit piano ballad.
The most middle-of-the-road moment, literally, is ‘Passenger Seat’ which sounds less edgy than Sheryl Crow. This highway song is also the album’s lyrical nadir with its checklisted bottles of coke, rolled down roof, dashboard radio, steering wheel and rearview mirrors. Cross out all the clichés and the lyric sheet would match the redactions on a CIA report about US counter-terrorism techniques.
The second best song is ‘White Horses’ which has verses sung by the group’s drummer, Joel Amey, with Rowsell arriving for the Enya-ish chorus. Its composition was informed by the hypnotic krautrock of CAN and the electro-psychedelia of ‘The Sunshine Underground’ by superstar DJs The Chemical Brothers. It’s more of a dilution of those two heady blueprints than much of an advancement or twist. Nevertheless, ‘White Horses’ is one of the few other moments on The Clearing that suggest a more compelling and higher aspiring album trying to break out.
This brings us to the two main strengths of the record. The first is the lyrics. In ‘White Horses’ Amey addresses his own family heritage which for years remained an unexplored mystery because his mother and aunt were adopted in their childhoods. His song ruminates on identity, immigration, travel, home, displacement and diaspora in a way that melds the personal to the universal and feels totally pertinent to the times in which we live.
Apart from that clunking road song of hers, Rowsell has much to say as well. She delivers her thoughts confidently yet fills them with questions, self-examination and sly caveats. Her themes include the trajectories of female friendships, how tricky it is to get one’s head around the corporeal and spiritual experience of ageing, the potentially cringeworthy narcissism of turning personal issues into art and performance, and the general confusion of being rockstar in her 30s, as she ponders aloud what might happen next… or what might not.
The second major plus-point is Rowsell’s voice. It is undeniably powerful, exhibiting greater range than ever before. Most of the time she doesn’t hold back at all – why would you when possessed with those pipes? – though she can still bring it down a notch when required. Her parts are full of distinctive inflections and, if anything, the album is a showcase for that talent. She appears very high in the mix and that’s with good reason.
An album does not sink or swim on its lyrics alone, unless Bob Dylan made it, and even Mariah Carey needs to sing along to notable backings for her songs to elevate from forgettable vanilla to solid gold smashes. ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.
