Rewrite
With The Clearing, their fourth album and first on a major label, Wolf Alice scale new heights while holding fast to their unshakable bond. At its centre, Ellie Rowsell embraces her role as Britain’s defining frontwoman.
Within the opening lines of “The Sofa” – the closing track and second single from Wolf Alice’s transformative fourth studio album, The Clearing – Ellie Rowsell makes perhaps the most revealing admission of her career.
“Hope I can accept the wild thing in me / Hope nobody comes to tame her / And she can be free.”
It feels less like she’s addressing an audience than confiding in herself: a plea to keep alive the same fire that’s carried her band through a decade of tours, triumphs and defining moments.
Ellie’s wish isn’t framed as sorrow, but as something more gracious – a cordial request. Now in her early thirties, settled into the contours of her life, she finds no refuge in excuses. She is an adult, unequivocally, and she accepts it. The title The Clearing suits the moment: the restlessness of her twenties swept away, leaving in its place acknowledgement, assurance, and the beginnings of peace.
“I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay,” her voice soars with warmth in the pre-chorus. And, with the journey of self-realisation she has undertaken throughout the album’s 10 previous tracks, it’s clear she means it.
Today though, sitting in a charmingly tacky cafe in Seven Sisters, Ellie has seen better days. “I’m a bit hungover,” she croaks wryly, guzzing down her flat white as if it’s been medically prescribed. The night prior, she joined 90,000 others at Wembley to belt her heart out to Oasis as the band brought their reunion tour to the English capital. Aside from the Mancunian legends’ unfiltered singalong joy, the show provided solid homework for the 32-year-old; later in the year Wolf Alice will embark on their own – a first – arena tour, including two homecoming shows across the capital’s east at the O2 Arena. Ellie quietly relishes the notion: “It’s intimidating, but I think it’s also exciting. It feels like a new challenge,” she smiles, twinkling at the prospect.
Ellie is a considered and complex character – ‘sensitive’ is her favourite adjective after all, a lyrical declaration from “Smile” on the band’s third album that she still upholds today. “Imagine you weren’t sensitive, you’d be a psychopath,” she giggles. Speaking wisely more often than not, she holds a propensity to sew answers that cover a tapestry of bases rather than committing to anything too parabolic. “I don’t know,” she ponders slowly, thinking about whether she feels that she expects too much from herself. “These days I do think I am quite self-critical. Maybe I’ve become like that. But I’m also aware that you can’t achieve perfection and the best thing to do is have fun. So I’m trying to chase that more than some kind of self enlightenment.”
It’s an overcast, sleepy Sunday at high noon in early August, a matter of weeks before the release of Wolf Alice’s highly anticipated latest record. Ellie is dressed down, suitably casual in a black and white sweater with the words ‘New York’ plastered across its front. The nonchalant fit is a far cry from the éclat flamboyance of her new album’s eccentric visual identity – all leather-clad sex appeal and gaudy colour schemes.
Conceptualised by photographer Rachel Fleminger Hudson – a first time that Wolf Alice involved a singular creative to handle an entire album’s visual presentation – Ellie (alongside bassist Theo Ellis, guitarist Joff Oddie and drummer Joel Amey) found full trust in an outside force. “[Rachel is] very romantic and I actually was really moved by the way she worked,” she says. “Sometimes you get embarrassed about caring so much about your work so it’s nice to meet someone that matches that energy. She made thousands of decks explaining what everything sounded like to her. She was so passionate and cared so much which was so lovely. From then on I didn’t feel afraid to share the world with her.”
The cover art in particular steals your gaze. A pitch black plain exterior setting with Ellie standing alone, central, spotlighted. Wearing knee-high boots and a skin-tight leotard, her waist length brunette hair flowing, she holds a microphone and leans back to the heavens. It’s her and nothing else – allegorical perhaps, of her consequential step into stardom with this new album.
The Clearing is an inaugural LP on a major label for the band, following a move to Columbia Records after three albums on independent imprint Dirty Hit. It arrives off of the back of a sensational sunset showcase at Glastonbury (“All our friends were very emotional, and I mean, why do you do anything if not to please your mates?”) and with as much industry chatter surrounding it as any British album this year. All-in-all, it feels like Wolf Alice – and their iconic frontwoman – have never been bigger. So is Ellie feeling the heat? “I don’t get recognised unless I go to Koko or something,” she shrugs off, hearty in her dismissal of notoriety. “I think if I thought [about fame] then I maybe would quit. For the most part, my life hasn’t changed. I still live in the same place and all my friends are the same.”
Ellie is a born-and-bred Londoner – north of the river through-and-through. The city has been a constant thread throughout her life and artistry – whether it be moving into her own place in Seven Sisters and writing much of The Clearing on her new home’s piano, or the triumphant and affirming embryonic memories with the band, the times that made them believe in what was possible. “We always talk about when we first played [Shoreditch venue] The Old Blue Last. That was our dream and we did it. It was ten years ago, but it’s those first things that you do – having a real show where music lovers turn up, not just anyone who’s passing by. I don’t know if I’ve ever matched that feeling,” she says, almost blushing in the admittance, before adding only half jokingly: “Maybe that’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
For the production of the new album though, Wolf Alice left their Metropolitan comforts for the opportunistic vibrance of Los Angeles, the second time they’d done so after embarking across the Atlantic for their Mercury Prize-winning sophomore Visions Of A Life. “I definitely think there is a romanticism inherently attached,” Ellie says on the City of Angeles where the band spent around three months last year sharpening their LP with pop superproducer Greg Kurstin. “Geographically, when you get there, you’re like, ‘This looks amazing.’ All the lights and stuff, it is truly romantic there. And also, there is a musical romance there that I don’t see matched here. People aren’t afraid, they’re less tentative to express their musical love. I went to a party and people were playing guitar and jamming, and they weren’t embarrassed and they weren’t on drugs [laughs]. Once you get over your Britishness, you probably will find yourself quite musically inspired there.”
Working with nine-time Grammy winner Kurstin, who boasts Adele, Lily Allen, Paul McCartney, Gorillaz and a further assemblage of stars amid his discography, was something the band always wanted to do. The choice paid dividends too; he facilitated Wolf Alice’s unyielding vision for The Clearing rather than attempting to overreach his own influence. “Everyone wants to work with Greg,” Ellie says. “We’re pretty anal and we like to make sure everything is watertight before we go into the studio. It can actually be quite laborious. So we had a very clear idea of what we wanted to do, but then working with Greg, he’s so amazing that we were very much like, ‘You do whatever you need to do.’ We made some songs pretty quickly and then we listened back and it wasn’t right. We told him, and he wanted to understand what we wanted. A good producer can do whatever – once we realised that he’s not there to make his album, he’s there to make ours, and we were brave enough to be like, ‘Actually we were going for this,’ he’s like, ‘Oh great,’ and from there it was smooth sailing.”
Since the mid-May unleashing of the album’s opening teaser track “Bloom Baby Bloom” – a swaggered serenade of self-aggradisation told through melodramatic piano stabs and breathtaking vocality – it was apparent that Wolf Alice would be taking a turn away from what was expected. It’s certainly not the first time they’ve sought after new sonic terrain; in fact they’ve shapeshifted at each possible checkpoint. 2015 debut My Love Is Cool brought heady folk and shoegaze, whilst the 2017 sophomore Visions of A Life ventured into synth-led productions, dream pop and scuzzy punk. Blue Weekend, 2021’s third album, was their boldest, busiest and heaviest yet; carefree and cumbersome alternative rock to knock your socks off.
After the musical intricacy and indulgence of its predecessor, for The Clearing the band went back to basics. “We wanted it to sound like you can picture the people playing it. That was important to us, because we didn’t do that on Blue Weekend. So maybe it was a natural rejection of that style. We were thinking about our live show when making this record, because we realised that that is what we spend most of time doing so we might as well tailor stuff towards that this time around.”
Written primarily on the piano and acoustic guitar, the record finds Wolf Alice and Ellie presenting a whole new artistic outlook. Gone is the glitzy youthful angst of “Don’t Delete The Kisses” and “Bros”, in its rich, often understated complexity. There’s the gentle balladry of “Midnight Song”, the glam rock grooves of “Just Two Girls”, the free-wheeling psychedelia of “White Horses”. It’s rooted in ‘70s zeal, with George Harrison, ELO, Fleetwood Mac among its influences. Yet it’s fresh, revitalising and boundary-pushing – bulging with Kirstin’s subtle production nuances that add modern flavour to the rich, naturalistic melting pot.
Bolstered by the space and opulence of the album’s texture, vocally Ellie has never sounded better. She approached the process with a new-found freedom, letting her inhibitions down, facilely exploring the crevices of her range. “Bloom Baby Bloom” may be the epitome: “Watch me, yeah, you’ll see just what I’m worth,” she affirms, a fitting characterisation of her burgeoning self-worth.
“It’s just being tired of this narrative of figuring stuff out and actually asking, ‘Okay what have I figured out?’” Ellie explains on the lyrical core. “There’s a directness in that that is appealing to me. I’m done with vagueness and ambiguity. I want to be braver and more accepting. I used to hate writing love songs because I used to think you had to feel it to write it or that every time you write a love song, it has to be your best song. It’s about rejecting what I felt was expected of me as a young woman.”
The UK guitar sphere is now littered with strong female protagonists – from The Last Dinner Party to Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale, Rachel Chinouriri to English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine. But rewind 15 years, and there was a distinct lack of women in British rock music for developing artists to look up to. But Ellie was headstrong enough to look beyond what was placed in front of her. “I’m lucky because I didn’t really take stock about it myself,” she reflects. “I felt like I could be Julian Casablanca or Kurt Cobain.”
So what changed? It’s true that the industry has widened its narrow gaze – somewhat, at least – and realised that there’s more to indie music than four mop-haired white lads. But someone had to set the blueprint, lay down the marker, stand tall in the cavalry for change. For such an emblem, we need look no further than Ellie. When there were mere few inspirations for her when embarking into the male-dominated industry (she does, though, pinpoint Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as an important figure), she proved a paradigm of progression, an empowered, vulnerable and unfiltered voice able to sell-out stadiums and tenderly pierce the soul alike.
Even now, four albums and over a decade deep, Ellie feels the shackles of expectation loosening; the shedding of her instrument is symbolic of her continual growth. “It’s been really freeing for me to not feel like I need to play the guitar to be taken seriously as a musician,” she reveals. “I find it really hard. I like singing but I always thought, ‘Oh all girls like singing,’ but now I’m like, ‘I don’t fucking care.’ I don’t need to have the guitar to prove anything to anyone or to myself, mainly. I don’t want to be that person.”
She hasn’t done it alone, though. In Theo, Joff and Joel, Ellie has found her closest confidants and collaborators. They’ve stuck together through thick and thin throughout all these years – a rare achievement for the infamously topsy turvy nature of band life. “Yeah…I don’t really know,” she chuckles at how the quintet have managed to stay united. “I think just because we all have a mutual respect for our music, every time anything tries to get in the way, that’s always been the prevalent thing. It’s what I imagine parents feel if they don’t like each other anymore but they love their children. But we’re also friends and we enjoy each other’s company and that’s just lucky I think.“
Ellie wears jacket & shorts MILÓMARIA; boots ROKER; tights FALKE
Whether it be Stevie Nicks stepping out of Fleetwood Mac or Hayley Williams’ sonic sidequests from Paramore, eventually, frontwomen tend to plot a solo course. But Ellie holds only a single credit away from the Wolf Alice sobriquet – a feature on the Mura Masa track “Teenage Headache Dreams”. With her maturing musicality and personal metamorphosis, does she see that changing anytime soon? “Yes and no,” she laughs. “I feel like I would make something and then I’d be like, ‘What does Joel and Joff and Theo think of this’, and then it’d end up just being for Wolf Alice. I need constant validation so I don’t imagine how I would do anything on my own. But I’m open to anything really.”
The bond between Wolf Alice is esoteric, unable to be fully understood if not intertwined within. Ellie is strong, assured, steadfast, but unafraid to rely on her friends’ wisdom and guidance. This joint vision, and The Clearing’s fearless approach, sees Wolf Alice settling into their rightful position as their generation’s quintessential rock band – and Ellie finally realising her position as Britain’s defining frontwoman.
With the monumental autumn-set tour to come, Ellie and her pack have never felt so impactful. It feels like a summit; a creative peak reached after a decade of measured crescendo. And whilst that should – and will – be celebrated, where does it leave Ellie Rowsell and Wolf Alice? “Once you’ve pleased yourself, then everything is easier,” she concludes slowly as we leave the cafe, stretching her eyes around the high street, eager no doubt to proceed with an afternoon of recovery and shaking off the unshakeable cadence of “Slide Away”. “After all, I’m only trying to impress myself, really…not to say don’t care what people think – I really do. But once I’ve achieved my own pleasure, I’ve succeeded. That’s all I’m chasing.”
Pre-order Wonderland’s 20th Anniversary Issue now.
Photography by James Robinson
Styling by Abigail Hazard
Words by
Hair by Yumi Nakada using Bumble and bumble.
Make-up by Anna Payne at Blend Management
Photography Assistant Pip Woolley
Fashion Interns Jiayue Jenny Li, Daryl Butler
Fashion Assistant Agostinho Sousa Junior
Videography by Lauren Austin
Special Thanks to The Zetter
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With The Clearing, their fourth album and first on a major label, Wolf Alice scale new heights while holding fast to their unshakable bond. At its centre, Ellie Rowsell embraces her role as Britain’s defining frontwoman.
Within the opening lines of “The Sofa” – the closing track and second single from Wolf Alice’s transformative fourth studio album, The Clearing – Ellie Rowsell makes perhaps the most revealing admission of her career.
“Hope I can accept the wild thing in me / Hope nobody comes to tame her / And she can be free.”
It feels less like she’s addressing an audience than confiding in herself: a plea to keep alive the same fire that’s carried her band through a decade of tours, triumphs and defining moments.
Ellie’s wish isn’t framed as sorrow, but as something more gracious – a cordial request. Now in her early thirties, settled into the contours of her life, she finds no refuge in excuses. She is an adult, unequivocally, and she accepts it. The title The Clearing suits the moment: the restlessness of her twenties swept away, leaving in its place acknowledgement, assurance, and the beginnings of peace.
“I’ll be fine, I’ll be okay,” her voice soars with warmth in the pre-chorus. And, with the journey of self-realisation she has undertaken throughout the album’s 10 previous tracks, it’s clear she means it.
Today though, sitting in a charmingly tacky cafe in Seven Sisters, Ellie has seen better days. “I’m a bit hungover,” she croaks wryly, guzzing down her flat white as if it’s been medically prescribed. The night prior, she joined 90,000 others at Wembley to belt her heart out to Oasis as the band brought their reunion tour to the English capital. Aside from the Mancunian legends’ unfiltered singalong joy, the show provided solid homework for the 32-year-old; later in the year Wolf Alice will embark on their own – a first – arena tour, including two homecoming shows across the capital’s east at the O2 Arena. Ellie quietly relishes the notion: “It’s intimidating, but I think it’s also exciting. It feels like a new challenge,” she smiles, twinkling at the prospect.
Ellie is a considered and complex character – ‘sensitive’ is her favourite adjective after all, a lyrical declaration from “Smile” on the band’s third album that she still upholds today. “Imagine you weren’t sensitive, you’d be a psychopath,” she giggles. Speaking wisely more often than not, she holds a propensity to sew answers that cover a tapestry of bases rather than committing to anything too parabolic. “I don’t know,” she ponders slowly, thinking about whether she feels that she expects too much from herself. “These days I do think I am quite self-critical. Maybe I’ve become like that. But I’m also aware that you can’t achieve perfection and the best thing to do is have fun. So I’m trying to chase that more than some kind of self enlightenment.”
It’s an overcast, sleepy Sunday at high noon in early August, a matter of weeks before the release of Wolf Alice’s highly anticipated latest record. Ellie is dressed down, suitably casual in a black and white sweater with the words ‘New York’ plastered across its front. The nonchalant fit is a far cry from the éclat flamboyance of her new album’s eccentric visual identity – all leather-clad sex appeal and gaudy colour schemes.
Conceptualised by photographer Rachel Fleminger Hudson – a first time that Wolf Alice involved a singular creative to handle an entire album’s visual presentation – Ellie (alongside bassist Theo Ellis, guitarist Joff Oddie and drummer Joel Amey) found full trust in an outside force. “[Rachel is] very romantic and I actually was really moved by the way she worked,” she says. “Sometimes you get embarrassed about caring so much about your work so it’s nice to meet someone that matches that energy. She made thousands of decks explaining what everything sounded like to her. She was so passionate and cared so much which was so lovely. From then on I didn’t feel afraid to share the world with her.”
The cover art in particular steals your gaze. A pitch black plain exterior setting with Ellie standing alone, central, spotlighted. Wearing knee-high boots and a skin-tight leotard, her waist length brunette hair flowing, she holds a microphone and leans back to the heavens. It’s her and nothing else – allegorical perhaps, of her consequential step into stardom with this new album.
The Clearing is an inaugural LP on a major label for the band, following a move to Columbia Records after three albums on independent imprint Dirty Hit. It arrives off of the back of a sensational sunset showcase at Glastonbury (“All our friends were very emotional, and I mean, why do you do anything if not to please your mates?”) and with as much industry chatter surrounding it as any British album this year. All-in-all, it feels like Wolf Alice – and their iconic frontwoman – have never been bigger. So is Ellie feeling the heat? “I don’t get recognised unless I go to Koko or something,” she shrugs off, hearty in her dismissal of notoriety. “I think if I thought [about fame] then I maybe would quit. For the most part, my life hasn’t changed. I still live in the same place and all my friends are the same.”
Ellie is a born-and-bred Londoner – north of the river through-and-through. The city has been a constant thread throughout her life and artistry – whether it be moving into her own place in Seven Sisters and writing much of The Clearing on her new home’s piano, or the triumphant and affirming embryonic memories with the band, the times that made them believe in what was possible. “We always talk about when we first played [Shoreditch venue] The Old Blue Last. That was our dream and we did it. It was ten years ago, but it’s those first things that you do – having a real show where music lovers turn up, not just anyone who’s passing by. I don’t know if I’ve ever matched that feeling,” she says, almost blushing in the admittance, before adding only half jokingly: “Maybe that’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
For the production of the new album though, Wolf Alice left their Metropolitan comforts for the opportunistic vibrance of Los Angeles, the second time they’d done so after embarking across the Atlantic for their Mercury Prize-winning sophomore Visions Of A Life. “I definitely think there is a romanticism inherently attached,” Ellie says on the City of Angeles where the band spent around three months last year sharpening their LP with pop superproducer Greg Kurstin. “Geographically, when you get there, you’re like, ‘This looks amazing.’ All the lights and stuff, it is truly romantic there. And also, there is a musical romance there that I don’t see matched here. People aren’t afraid, they’re less tentative to express their musical love. I went to a party and people were playing guitar and jamming, and they weren’t embarrassed and they weren’t on drugs [laughs]. Once you get over your Britishness, you probably will find yourself quite musically inspired there.”
Working with nine-time Grammy winner Kurstin, who boasts Adele, Lily Allen, Paul McCartney, Gorillaz and a further assemblage of stars amid his discography, was something the band always wanted to do. The choice paid dividends too; he facilitated Wolf Alice’s unyielding vision for The Clearing rather than attempting to overreach his own influence. “Everyone wants to work with Greg,” Ellie says. “We’re pretty anal and we like to make sure everything is watertight before we go into the studio. It can actually be quite laborious. So we had a very clear idea of what we wanted to do, but then working with Greg, he’s so amazing that we were very much like, ‘You do whatever you need to do.’ We made some songs pretty quickly and then we listened back and it wasn’t right. We told him, and he wanted to understand what we wanted. A good producer can do whatever – once we realised that he’s not there to make his album, he’s there to make ours, and we were brave enough to be like, ‘Actually we were going for this,’ he’s like, ‘Oh great,’ and from there it was smooth sailing.”
Since the mid-May unleashing of the album’s opening teaser track “Bloom Baby Bloom” – a swaggered serenade of self-aggradisation told through melodramatic piano stabs and breathtaking vocality – it was apparent that Wolf Alice would be taking a turn away from what was expected. It’s certainly not the first time they’ve sought after new sonic terrain; in fact they’ve shapeshifted at each possible checkpoint. 2015 debut My Love Is Cool brought heady folk and shoegaze, whilst the 2017 sophomore Visions of A Life ventured into synth-led productions, dream pop and scuzzy punk. Blue Weekend, 2021’s third album, was their boldest, busiest and heaviest yet; carefree and cumbersome alternative rock to knock your socks off.
After the musical intricacy and indulgence of its predecessor, for The Clearing the band went back to basics. “We wanted it to sound like you can picture the people playing it. That was important to us, because we didn’t do that on Blue Weekend. So maybe it was a natural rejection of that style. We were thinking about our live show when making this record, because we realised that that is what we spend most of time doing so we might as well tailor stuff towards that this time around.”
Written primarily on the piano and acoustic guitar, the record finds Wolf Alice and Ellie presenting a whole new artistic outlook. Gone is the glitzy youthful angst of “Don’t Delete The Kisses” and “Bros”, in its rich, often understated complexity. There’s the gentle balladry of “Midnight Song”, the glam rock grooves of “Just Two Girls”, the free-wheeling psychedelia of “White Horses”. It’s rooted in ‘70s zeal, with George Harrison, ELO, Fleetwood Mac among its influences. Yet it’s fresh, revitalising and boundary-pushing – bulging with Kirstin’s subtle production nuances that add modern flavour to the rich, naturalistic melting pot.
Bolstered by the space and opulence of the album’s texture, vocally Ellie has never sounded better. She approached the process with a new-found freedom, letting her inhibitions down, facilely exploring the crevices of her range. “Bloom Baby Bloom” may be the epitome: “Watch me, yeah, you’ll see just what I’m worth,” she affirms, a fitting characterisation of her burgeoning self-worth.
“It’s just being tired of this narrative of figuring stuff out and actually asking, ‘Okay what have I figured out?’” Ellie explains on the lyrical core. “There’s a directness in that that is appealing to me. I’m done with vagueness and ambiguity. I want to be braver and more accepting. I used to hate writing love songs because I used to think you had to feel it to write it or that every time you write a love song, it has to be your best song. It’s about rejecting what I felt was expected of me as a young woman.”
The UK guitar sphere is now littered with strong female protagonists – from The Last Dinner Party to Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale, Rachel Chinouriri to English Teacher’s Lily Fontaine. But rewind 15 years, and there was a distinct lack of women in British rock music for developing artists to look up to. But Ellie was headstrong enough to look beyond what was placed in front of her. “I’m lucky because I didn’t really take stock about it myself,” she reflects. “I felt like I could be Julian Casablanca or Kurt Cobain.”
So what changed? It’s true that the industry has widened its narrow gaze – somewhat, at least – and realised that there’s more to indie music than four mop-haired white lads. But someone had to set the blueprint, lay down the marker, stand tall in the cavalry for change. For such an emblem, we need look no further than Ellie. When there were mere few inspirations for her when embarking into the male-dominated industry (she does, though, pinpoint Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as an important figure), she proved a paradigm of progression, an empowered, vulnerable and unfiltered voice able to sell-out stadiums and tenderly pierce the soul alike.
Even now, four albums and over a decade deep, Ellie feels the shackles of expectation loosening; the shedding of her instrument is symbolic of her continual growth. “It’s been really freeing for me to not feel like I need to play the guitar to be taken seriously as a musician,” she reveals. “I find it really hard. I like singing but I always thought, ‘Oh all girls like singing,’ but now I’m like, ‘I don’t fucking care.’ I don’t need to have the guitar to prove anything to anyone or to myself, mainly. I don’t want to be that person.”
She hasn’t done it alone, though. In Theo, Joff and Joel, Ellie has found her closest confidants and collaborators. They’ve stuck together through thick and thin throughout all these years – a rare achievement for the infamously topsy turvy nature of band life. “Yeah…I don’t really know,” she chuckles at how the quintet have managed to stay united. “I think just because we all have a mutual respect for our music, every time anything tries to get in the way, that’s always been the prevalent thing. It’s what I imagine parents feel if they don’t like each other anymore but they love their children. But we’re also friends and we enjoy each other’s company and that’s just lucky I think.“
Ellie wears jacket & shorts MILÓMARIA; boots ROKER; tights FALKE
Whether it be Stevie Nicks stepping out of Fleetwood Mac or Hayley Williams’ sonic sidequests from Paramore, eventually, frontwomen tend to plot a solo course. But Ellie holds only a single credit away from the Wolf Alice sobriquet – a feature on the Mura Masa track “Teenage Headache Dreams”. With her maturing musicality and personal metamorphosis, does she see that changing anytime soon? “Yes and no,” she laughs. “I feel like I would make something and then I’d be like, ‘What does Joel and Joff and Theo think of this’, and then it’d end up just being for Wolf Alice. I need constant validation so I don’t imagine how I would do anything on my own. But I’m open to anything really.”
The bond between Wolf Alice is esoteric, unable to be fully understood if not intertwined within. Ellie is strong, assured, steadfast, but unafraid to rely on her friends’ wisdom and guidance. This joint vision, and The Clearing’s fearless approach, sees Wolf Alice settling into their rightful position as their generation’s quintessential rock band – and Ellie finally realising her position as Britain’s defining frontwoman.
With the monumental autumn-set tour to come, Ellie and her pack have never felt so impactful. It feels like a summit; a creative peak reached after a decade of measured crescendo. And whilst that should – and will – be celebrated, where does it leave Ellie Rowsell and Wolf Alice? “Once you’ve pleased yourself, then everything is easier,” she concludes slowly as we leave the cafe, stretching her eyes around the high street, eager no doubt to proceed with an afternoon of recovery and shaking off the unshakeable cadence of “Slide Away”. “After all, I’m only trying to impress myself, really…not to say don’t care what people think – I really do. But once I’ve achieved my own pleasure, I’ve succeeded. That’s all I’m chasing.”
Pre-order Wonderland’s 20th Anniversary Issue now.
Photography by James Robinson
Styling by Abigail Hazard
Words by
Hair by Yumi Nakada using Bumble and bumble.
Make-up by Anna Payne at Blend Management
Photography Assistant Pip Woolley
Fashion Interns Jiayue Jenny Li, Daryl Butler
Fashion Assistant Agostinho Sousa Junior
Videography by Lauren Austin
Special Thanks to The Zetter
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