Into The Music
Wolf Alice are headlining major festivals and topping UK charts in 2025 and 2026, which means this is a good moment to explain how a band from North London that started as an acoustic duo a decade and a half ago became one of the most consistently excellent rock bands working anywhere.
Ellie Rowsell and Joff Oddie met at an open mic night at the Hope and Anchor in Islington in 2010. They played their first show that December, supporting another band at Highbury Garage, and spent the next few years as a small-scale indie project releasing EPs and building a fanbase through relentless touring. The full band lineup – with drummer Joel Amey and bassist Theo Ellis – solidified in 2012. They released their debut single “Fluffy” in February 2013, and the world took a little while to catch up.
The Albums
My Love Is Cool, released in 2015, was the first proper introduction for most people. The album moved between delicate folk-influenced passages and full-volume noise rock with an ease that felt almost accidental – like the band was just following wherever the song needed to go, regardless of whether that place was quiet or loud. It debuted inside the UK top 10 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance for the single “Moaning Lisa Smile.”
Visions of a Life, in 2017, was better. The title track alone – eight minutes of escalating noise and release – earned the album its reputation. It debuted at number two on the UK chart and won the Mercury Prize. At that point, Wolf Alice had the thing that is hardest to manufacture: critical credibility and a real audience at the same time.
Blue Weekend (2021) became their first UK number-one album and won the 2022 Brit Award for British Group. It is their most polished record – less volatile than Visions, more cinematic – and it confirmed that Rowsell's songwriting had grown into something that could sustain different emotional registers without losing the band's essential character. The Clearing, released in August 2025, debuted at number one as well and earned a nomination for the 2026 Brit Award for British Album of the Year.
Why They Matter
Wolf Alice exist in a specific space that is increasingly rare: a guitar band that is genuinely popular. Not popular for a guitar band, not popular in a nostalgic-revival kind of way. Just popular. The Clearing went to number one in a market where rock music is generally treated as a heritage genre.
Part of what makes them work is that Rowsell does not perform like someone with something to prove. Her stage presence is absorbing in a way that rewards attention without demanding it – the music pulls you in, and then you realize how completely she's been operating the whole time. Oddie's guitar playing is exceptional in the way that excellent supporting work is always exceptional: it serves the song first and shows off second, and the showing off mostly happens because the song required it.
The band plays the SNL UK premiere on March 28, joining Riz Ahmed and Kasabian on the episode that follows Tina Fey's debut hosting turn. It is the kind of television appearance that confirms a band's standing in a cultural moment, and Wolf Alice are well overdue for that kind of moment in the American market. The Clearing is the album to bring them there, if anything will.