The desire to be it all: Decoding Wolf Alice’s masterful new single ‘The Sofa’
“Let me lie here on the sofa” is a simple enough request, one that everyone surely knows well. It’s the desire to do nothing and be left alone to do that. But on Wolf Alice’s second offering from their upcoming album The Clearing, ‘The Sofa’ means more than just a soft place to rest achey bones.
So far, for this record, the band seem far more mature. Blue Weekend hinted at this new chapter as tracks like ‘Last Man on Earth’ or ‘Lipstick on the Glass’ offered something more restrained than usual. Each of their records has done both, balancing all-out rager indie tunes with more downtempo, introspective ballads. But ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ and ‘The Sofa’ are different. It’s not about the songs being loud or quiet, happy or sad. Instead, it’s more about the mix of it all; the interesting use of pauses and breaks in the era opening comeback, and the cinematic energy of this follow-up.
As the band seem to endeavour to do it all at once, refusing to be boxed into any one sound or trapped in any easy definition, ‘The Sofa’ captures it perfectly. A song craving some downtime as Ellie Rowsell near enough howls for permission to lie down, the track is mostly also about wanting a reprieve from a world that expects you to pick a side and be one thing.
“Hope I can accept the wild thing in me / Hope nobody comes to tame her / And she can be free,” Rowsell sings, introducing one half of the whole she embodies on this track. The other half comes later as a wistful post-chorus sings, “Be no one thing / the intellectual beauty queen / And the wild thing”. Balancing two sides of her brain, the longing to be both reckless and free, with the longing to be poised and powerful, these two figures capture the full spectrum of the shades Rowsell wishes to embody.
‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ plays on those lines too as Rowsell wails, “Look at me trying to play it hard / I’m so sick and tired of trying to play it hard”, desiring to simply “bloom” in the face of adversity rather than grow tough to it. “I just am who I am,” she sings on that track, capturing the same wish to merely be.
But in the exhaustion of wishing to be everything all at once in a world that rarely allows us the chance to do that without demanding we pick a lane, ‘The Sofa’ decides there’s only one thing for it: “Let me lie here on the sofa”.
In the centre of a cloud of confusion and frustration, Rowsell and Co merely want to be left alone to be conflicting in peace. As the pre-chorus sings of being happy, being sad, being a bitch, wanting love, or just wanting quick affection, it’s another way they capture the contradictions in each of us succinctly before flopping onto the soft surface and begging to be left there to our own devices where the world won’t demand a quick explanation for a multi-faceted existence.
