How Ellie Rowsell channelled her inspirations into Wolf Alice’s success
Wolf Alice feel like a band who have done it all. Across their three, nearly four albums, a scattering of EPs and B-sides, they cover all bases. ‘Moaning Lisa Smile’ and ‘Play The Greatest Hits’ are raging rock songs. ‘No Hard Feelings’ and ‘White Leather’ are soft, considered, introspective. Anthems like ‘Bros’ or ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ are exactly that: anthems. They’re dynamic, and all of that comes down to dynamic inspirations.
Their new single, ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, added something new to the pile. It’s an expertly arranged piece that is soft, then heavy, then theatrical, then punky, all over the course of a sub-four-minute run time. It’s a masterpiece, and one that speaks boldly to the band’s development. Wolf Alice are no longer just another British indie band, not one to toss into landfill with so many of their peers who emerged back in the 2010s, too, but then couldn’t develop beyond that.
No, Wolf Alice have always evolved too fast for that. By their debut album, their first EPs couldn’t keep up. By 2017’s Visions Of A Life, they were Mercury Award winners, bagging a prestigious award that has often landed in the hands of elevated and bold artists. Blue Weekend was an evolution again as the band released an album that can only be described as thorough, feeling like a full emotional journey and packed with songs that once again levelled up, being endlessly more epic and interesting in their craft. They’ve always remained steps ahead, meaning that they’d never been easily quantifiable. Still today, and even as someone whose job is to attempt to define and describe music, the work of Wolf Alice is not easy to explain when each song feels like something new.
But that has always been their ethos. Way back in 2015, the band spoke to Indie Music about exactly that, sharing how they went into the studio to work on their debut armed with “our gut. And [a] mix of genres”. The aim of the game was bravery as they said they were focused on, “Being brave in both ways, I guess, because you can be brave and be left-field and be brave as a more left-field band, and be like we’re not afraid to write pop songs as well.”
That’s it…they said it a decade ago: bravery, guts, mixing things up, but also refusing to be shy about making hits – that’s the Wolf Alice way, and that’s exactly what’s reflected in Ellie Rowsell’s big merge of inspiration and the influences she brings into the group.
The band is an ever-evolving beast because her world as a music fan is too. “They’re ever changing really – there are people that I’ve been inspired by since I was a kid, some that I no longer find inspiring, and others I’ve just discovered,” Rowsell said, sharing how the recipe keeps getting mixed up.
As she lists artists she loves or has historically loved, everything makes sense. “I’ve always loved The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Queens Of The Stone Age,” she said, making perfect sense of the band’s true indie rock basis; the basis that first launched them way back in 2013 with tracks like ‘Fluffy’ or ‘She’, which definitely has a Karen O energy to it.
But as time has gone on, new things have come in. “For some years I’ve loved the work of Alex G – I think he’s one of the most exciting songwriters right now and his sounds are to my taste,” she said, picking out a more modern act. The band have directly honoured this when they shared a cover of his track ‘Bobby’. But Alex G’s merge of elements of indie, electro and lo-fi finds a place elsewhere in the group’s discography as they’re not afraid to go beyond the standard band set up; they’re not purists.
Overwhelmingly, though, Rowsell tries not to bother herself too much with strict ideas of inspiration or who inspires the band. Inevitably, her own listening habits as a music fan inform her musical world, but the vast and varied nature of that makes her want to be a vast and varied artist too, and somehow discussing who she loves feels limiting as so often the idea of a band being inspired by someone becomes a ‘for fans of’ type situation where suddenly their sound is boxed in and defined.
“I find the question hard, there’s no one easy answer because I feel like I’m pigeonholing myself,” she said, “Those are just the people that came to my mind today,” with countless more names playing a part in the world and the success of Wolf Alice.
