In an age of instant everything, Wolf Alice prove that the tortoise can still beat the hare. After they formed (initially as an acoustic duo) five years ago through the old-fashioned means of a music-paper advert, their career has been a slog of open mic events and online releases. However, as ears pricked up around the country, debut album My Love Is Cool swept to No 2 in June, and now they’re playing to packed-out houses.
On the face of it, the former fitness trainers and ice-cream salespeople from London could hardly be less fashionable if they sat around smoking dope and listening to Supertramp. Wolf Alice mix grunge and shoegaze – genres that both had their heyday before the band members were born – but bring youthful energy and concerns (friendships, fears, loneliness, goth) to a similarly new audience. The quartet aren’t ready to be pigeonholed, either, and opener My Love Is Cool is a country-folk lament, closer to Patsy Cline than Veruca Salt or Curve.
Equally, in a slight twist on the early 90s “quiet-then-loud” bands, Wolf Alice mix the muscular and noisy with something more elegiac and ethereal. If shaven-headed guitarist Joff Oddie and shouty bassist Theo Ellis could be an Oi! band photobombing an indie disco, the fragility comes from singer Ellie Rowsell, every bit the sultry indie star in torn tights and Dr Martens. Her aloofness (or shyness) gives her a certain unknowable quality, which is refreshing after years of professionally schooled entertainers, although she can still unleash a voice to trouble the building’s nice new paintwork.
It helps that the hormonally surging likes of Bros (about companionship, not the 80s horrors) sound guaranteed to fill an indie dancefloor, while The Wonderwhy echoes the floatier charms of the xx or Cocteau Twins. Granted, at this stage of the Wolf’s development, one or two of their numbers still sound as if they got lost in Camden Palace circa 1992, but Turn to Dust is dreamlike English folk via The Wicker Man soundtrack and Giant Peach’s enormous, metronomic krautrock groove recalls the heady days of Loop and Spacemen 3. Elements of an older generation may scoff – as older pop generations are wont to do – that they’ve “heard it all before”. However, for anyone under 25, abseiling over the crowd on others’ shoulders, ye olde indie rock experience may never have been such a thrill.
- At the Plug, Sheffield, on 22 September. Box office: 0114-241 3040. At the 02 Guildhall Southampton, on 23 September. Box office: 023-8063 2601. Then touring.
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