Forget Oasis and their silly bucket hats. If any group can claim to have shaped the DNA of Gen Z it’s Fleetwood Mac, champions of willowy melodies, hazy vocals and exciting retro capes.
The London four-piece Wolf Alice skip the capes on their fifth album, The Clearing. But otherwise their tack towards the Mac is blatant and unapologetic – a shift previewed over the summer when they covered Dreams, Stevie Nicks’s gauzy tour de force, at Glastonbury.
They are hardly going their own way: from Harry Styles to Haim and Olivia Rodrigo, a new generation of artists has proudly claimed Fleetwood Mac as an influence. Few, though, have been as explicit about it as Wolf Alice, who have compared The Clearing to “Fleetwood Mac writing an album today in north London”.
It’s a bold assertion, especially when you consider Fleetwood Mac’s classic albums were forged amid messy romantic splits, scented candles and blizzards of cocaine. Wolf Alice are, by contrast, clean living and sensible, and their self-conscious attempt to draw inspiration from the excesses, musical and otherwise, of the 1970s falls grimly short of their previous high standards.
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The Clearing is much too bland to be awful to listen to. Cautious and politely smooth at the edges, it captures indie royalty making a premeditated play for a mainstream audience and landing with a forgettable thud.
It’s hard to feel excited about this first release since they signed to Sony Music, which is also a taster for an upcoming arena tour. The Clearing feels like a triumph of calculation over heart. It lacks many things – essential melodies and hooks are in short supply – but it’s especially deficient in the exciting weirdness threaded through their previous work, particularly Blue Weekend, from 2021, produced by Markus Dravs, which is one of the finest records of the past decade.
That’s the howling shame: Wolf Alice weren’t just another indie band who fancied a bigger audience. They were something special, winners of the Mercury Prize for their sublimely shoegazy album Visions of a Life, from 2017, and musicians who seemed to have squared the circle of being a big-name alternative-rock act capable of constant surprise and reinvention.
Given their previous accomplishment, The Clearing is a let-down – though Wolf Alice cannot shoulder all the blame. In addition to marking their departure from the independent label Dirty Hit, The Clearing is their first collaboration with Greg Kurstin, producer of Adele and the Jonas Brothers.
It’s a match made in major-label purgatory: songs such as Thorns, the mid-tempo opener, which founders beneath an excess of strings, and the single Bloom Baby Bloom are listless and unexciting, no matter how hard Ellie Rowsell tries to drive things onwards with her velveteen vocals.
Kurstin’s go-to sound of inoffensively hummable pop yields underwhelming results on the fizz-free Just Two Girls and the anonymous Passenger Seat, where Rowsell’s voice is buried beneath cloying acoustic guitar.
Amid the syrup are some odd chugging moments that seem to be trying to give the project a pulse, but they’re too little, too late. On Bread Butter Tea Sugar, for instance, Wolf Alice pivot from Fleetwood Mac to another 1970s influence: the glam hod-carriers Slade.
Several of the other tunes are so slight that they recede from memory even as you’re listening to them: fillers such as Safe in the World and Midnight Song feel so removed from the haunting edge of Blue Weekend that it’s like listening to a different band.
Wolf Alice were always underdogs – it was among their more appealing qualities. Here they’re tragically adrift, with only the beautifully vulnerable White Horses recalling some of that old bruised majesty.
No band wants to stay in the same place forever, and well done to them for trying something different. But big-league rock stardom – or at least a stab at it – isn’t a good fit. On The Clearing, the previously searing Wolf Alice have lost their bite.
