NEW ALBUM: Wolf Alice – My Love is Cool
The first time we saw Wolf Alice was on the second day of SXSW 2015 at The Parish and we were pretty much blown away. The band had so much energy and singer Ellie Rowsell was so intense and beautiful that we both became immediate fans. The same has apparently happened to many, many more over the course of the last three years, during which the London four-piece could amass a significant following.
Now their debut album My Love Is Cool is finally out. To be honest, I haven’t known much of Wolf Alice before the first listen, aside from having Moaning Lisa Smile and Giant Peach on repeat. That made the album quite a surprise: the opener Turn To Dust is rather a slow-burning, quiet song with a Pink-Floydish vibe to it. Track two, Bros is about friendship and also far away from the songs that make Ellie scream and head-bang on stage (it features a wonderful video). Only with Your Loves Whore it gets finally louder.
But that is a Wolf Alice thing anyway: even within the same song they like to switch from quiet to loud, from Ellie almost whispering to screaming within a beat. On stage she needs two mics to support this – on the record it delivers many suprise moments. At first listen, who would have thought where You’re a Germ goes around 1:20?
The best reference I can think of is Garbage, in particular their 1995 debut. Back then, a female-fronted rock band was pretty much a novelty, today, fortunately, this is no longer the case. But there hasn’t been a band in a while which so effortlessly walks the line between rock and pop, loud and quiet, melodic and noisy like Wolf Alice.
My Love is Cool is out now on Dirty Hit. (iTunes, Spotify)
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