Through a jutted jaw, she reclaims attributes that some might perceive as weaknesses – caution, sensitivity, rage – but the song’s crowning moment finds her at the bar amid her fellow “lost souls”, drinking to fake that superhuman feeling. The squalling, stadium-ready Smile is a personal rebuke to Rowsell’s critics. There are more headstrong forays into the abyss. Maybe certain annihilation is the fantasy, though some self-preservationist instinct kicks in: “Hey, is mum there?” Rowsell sings in a small voice at the end. Nevertheless, she sings, paradoxically, of feeling “alive, like Marilyn Monroe”, and the dreamy song billows skywards like the ill-fated bombshell’s skirts, a blissed-out wall of guitar steadily charring. But Rowsell is well aware that “the vibes are kinda wrong” and that the man whose bed she’s in is “here for one thing”. Similarly, at first pass, the woozy Delicious Things comes off as a classic fantasy of a wide-eyed newcomer seduced by life in Los Angeles. Wolf Alice: How Can I Make It OK? – video Rowsell’s lyrics have never been stronger, telling of a breakup with friends (brooding opener The Beach), a litany of creeps, misogynists and a cheating lover: “I take you back / Yeah, I know it seems surprising,” she thunders on Lipstick on the Glass with a measure of ecstatic control, as if mirroring her prideful composure. She has said that Blue Weekend is her least autobiographical album: whatever the inspiration, it tells a convincingly lived-in story of searching in dark places for answers to some indefinable question of self-sabotage becoming a logical response to having your worst suspicions confirmed. It’s also one that’s seldom as straightforward as it seems, deriving its greatest potency from Ellie Rowsell’s subtly layered songwriting. Somehow they skirted both pitfalls: Blue Weekend is Wolf Alice’s biggest and most immediately satisfying album – cresting shoegaze, woozy classic rock, inventive acoustic songwriting cohered by melodies that aren’t just sticky, but frequently moving. Stuck in Dravs’ studio in Brussels, they meticulously refined the album, risking sucking the life from it. It’s a move that can fit uncomfortably for anyone not born in Bono’s image, as the low-key London four-piece clearly aren’t. They made it with Markus Dravs, the go-to producer for going big ( Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Florence + the Machine). W olf Alice’s third album could easily have been a disaster.
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