‘Just Two Girls’: How Wolf Alice perfectly capture girlhood
The second I heard Wolf Alice‘s ‘Just Two Girls’, or even heard simply the first verse, I hit copy link, clicked into the chat with my best friend, and hit paste. No doubt, several years back now, I did the exact same with ‘Bros’, thinking of her always and forever in the lyrics “I’ll keep you safe / You keep me strong.”
After Glastonbury this year, in the onslaught of Instagram round up posts of everyone’s highlight reel snaps from a hazy weekend, one stood out. Another friend of mine posted a video ripped from the BBC coverage of her on someone’s shoulders, raised above the crowd alongside her own best friend. As Wolf Alice played ‘Bros’ against a Sunday sunset, they were holding hands and embracing, singing along to the line, “Oh I’m so lucky, you are my best friend”. It made me want to cry tears of joy.
Songs about friendship are nothing new. Sure, in the rock and indie worlds, it never quite suits the prevailing angst that often cuts through, and Wolf Alice have provided plenty of that. But out of all of the experiences and emotions they’ve put to tape, there is something special and deeply poignant about the way Ellie Rowsell captures friendship, specifically, female friendship.
Maybe it’s purely a tenderness towards watching her, one of our time’s finest singers, carve out not just space but total domination among the male-dominated indie landscape. Escaping the landfill that so many of her initial peers fell into, Rowsell is on top, and from that podium, she’s singing about hanging with the girls. For the girls in the crowd, that’s always going to be something special.
But it’s more specific than that. In her lyricism, as the topic of friendship routinely comes up, Rowsell handles it with just as much, if not even more, love as she does romance. On ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’, the band’s ultimate love song, she nervously ponders a crush, wondering if it’s right, contemplating her moves. But on ‘Just Two Girls’, the love Rowsell writes of that she feels for her friends is steadfast. It’s assured, it’s unquestioned, it’s as pure and powerful as any girl knows her relationship with her bestie to be.
“When I undress my every thought / The way that you can’t pay for / We’re just two girls at the bar / Like two kids in the park,” Rowsell sings as the central lyric. Two girls who are both the therapist and the fun, the song dips between those role, from sipping palomas at a bar to the depth of a morning-after hangover debrief. From beauty tips to a heavy chat, she sings so adoringly and admiringly of her friend, “I like the way she chain-smokes incessantly / Tiny epiphanies when she’s drinking with me.”
‘Bros’ exists in the same world and that’s why I love that song too. Dipping between silly memories of bad haircuts and bus routes, there is also so much depth to the love in that song. In fact, really, if any song is the band’s ultimate love song, it’s that one – written by Rowsell for her best friend Sadie, which she reminds the crowd of near enough each time she plays it.
Love songs for best friends. Love songs for girls to sing about their girl, capturing the utter adoration you feel when you’re sitting there having some drinks with someone you feel completely understood by, who you can switch at lightning speed from fun to hard feelings. That’s friendship, that’s girlhood, and Ellie Rowsell is a poet of that particular experience.
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