‘The Last Man on Earth’: Ellie Rowsell’s greatest vocal performance
Now that Wolf Alice have been cemented as burgeoning rock gods of their time, with frontwoman Ellie Rowsell as their supreme leader, it’s easy to say that you’ve always known they would be big.
Sure, of course you did. This is a band who have been rumbling around now for more than a decade, and yet seemingly only recently have started receiving their proper flowers. The Clearing was undoubtedly one of the great high points in what was already a strong 2025, satiating a hunger for new music from the band that hadn’t been heard in some four years to that point.
But if we were to only take the most recent Wolf Alice efforts as the sole things worth their salt, it would be doing a huge disservice to the genesis of what makes the band so good in the first place. And you don’t have to look all that far: just back to 2021, with the release of the album Blue Weekend, and one of its standout singles, ‘The Last Man on Earth’.
I had already been a Wolf Alice fan from the early days, but hearing that track for the first time as it premiered on the radio was a truly pivotal experience. You’ve got to remember, this was still in the height of lockdown, when the world felt anything but expansive. Yet with the building crescendo of Rowsell’s vocals, you could be transported anywhere at all.
It’s that opening sound of quiet vulnerability that immediately catches the listener in the cradle of Rowsell’s allure: not that it initially presented anything stronger than the majority of women singing in the indie canon, but because there was an intrinsic feeling that something was burgeoning, and about to explode here.
Of course, anyone who predicted this was right in that regard, as Rowsell’s vocal soon soars to a level that had rarely been seen from her beforehand. It’s all well and good to listen to her grounded main melody, but the real heart of ‘The Last Man on Earth’ can be found, unsuspectingly, in the background.
It’s not just about her hitting the high notes. It’s the fact that this stratospheric, godly persona is inhabited, purely through the power of her voice alone, and left to lurk in the shadows. The result is never too blatant or shoved in your face – it’s there only to be found if you listen carefully, and get entranced under Wolf Alice’s spell.
It goes without saying that the whole song is intended for the effect of being stratospheric, but only so much of the distance can be travelled towards achieving this through the electricity harboured by guitars. The true essential ingredient to ensure the successful rocket launch is the quality of Rowsell: powerful, but never overstated, and perfectly timed.
In many ways, you can look at her performance on a song like ‘The Last Man on Earth’ and see it as a key to unlocking the band’s future – people were taken aback by the likes of ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, but that grit has always been held in Rowsell somewhere. She proves that the making of a great vocal is not just the end result, but the journey to getting there.
