Into The Music
Wolf Alice won Group of the Year at the 2026 BRIT Awards. They performed on Saturday Night Live UK, the second episode of the newly launched British version of the institution, alongside host Jamie Dornan. Their most recent album, The Clearing, came out in 2025 and continues to generate the kind of critical and commercial crossover that most British guitar bands spend their entire careers chasing without catching. By any reasonable measure, Wolf Alice are at the top of their game right now, and the strange thing is that they have been here before, and they earned it again from scratch.
The band formed in London in 2010, initially as an acoustic duo between singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie. Drummer Joel Amey and bassist Theo Ellis joined over the following years, and by the time their debut album My Love Is Cool arrived in 2015, the lineup was locked and the sound was already operating somewhere between shoegaze, grunge, and something more distinctly their own.
My Love Is Cool introduced Wolf Alice as a band with unusually wide emotional range. The same album that contained the dreamy, shimmering “Moaning Lisa Smile” also contained the full-volume guitar assault of “Bros” and the quietly devastating “Soapy Water.” That range was not accidental. Rowsell has always written in multiple registers, and the band has been willing to follow her wherever the song demands, which is rarer than it sounds.
Their second album, Visions of a Life, arrived in 2017 and won the Mercury Prize, the UK’s most prestigious music award. The title track remains one of the decade’s great guitar songs, a seven-minute escalation that builds and releases and builds again until it feels like it has physically expanded the room. Visions of a Life announced Wolf Alice as something more than a promising act. It announced them as a band with real artistic ambition and the technical ability to back it up.
Blue Weekend, their third record from 2021, won them a second Mercury Prize nomination and demonstrated that they could shift toward a cleaner, more polished sound without losing any of the emotional intensity that made their earlier work so compelling. It also coincided with a period of significant growth in their live presence, with headlining festival slots and arena shows that proved their music scaled upward without losing intimacy.
The Clearing is in some ways their most cohesive record. Rowsell has described it as a record about recovery and clarity, and the production choices support that. The arrangements are confident without being busy. The songs trust themselves. There is less of the anything-goes energy of the early records, and in its place something more considered, which suits where the band is now.
The BRIT win and the SNL UK appearance in the same week are not coincidences. Wolf Alice are in the middle of a genuine cultural moment, one built over a decade of making records that actually do what guitar music is supposed to do: make the listener feel something specific and real. The British music establishment, which has sometimes been slow to recognize guitar bands over the past decade, is catching up. Wolf Alice have been patient.
Rowsell in particular is one of the more compelling frontpeople working in rock right now. Her voice is elastic and expressive, capable of intimacy at low volumes and intensity at full power without losing the specific quality that makes it recognizable. Her guitar playing is intuitive rather than technical in a way that serves the songs perfectly. She writes about difficult things with honesty that does not tip into melodrama. These are not small gifts.
Wolf Alice are not likely to make the same album twice. That unpredictability, combined with the consistency of their quality, is what makes them worth following wherever they go next.