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Aug 20, 2025Wolf Alice are the kind of band that keep on getting better with every record, and here, they raise the bar on themselves once again.
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Aug 20, 2025This fourth album sees Wolf Alice fully embrace all facets of themselves, and through this newfound acceptance and confidence, they’ve produced their boldest, most striking record yet. One for the history books.
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Aug 28, 2025With each record, Wolf Alice return with more bite, a new story to tell, and new fans to invite into their world, The Clearing is no exception to the rule.
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Aug 22, 2025The Clearing remains unmistakably Wolf Alice: playful yet direct, ironic yet sincere. It’s a classic that shows a band confident in their evolution, unafraid to shed what no longer fits, and stepping forward with renewed purpose.
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Aug 22, 2025A triumph of ambition and heart, each of its songs feels like an epiphany.
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Sep 5, 2025The songs on The Clearing are strange and often totally mesmerizing.
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Record CollectorSep 5, 2025There's an abandoned sense of mischief and good times here that doesn't automatically come with overdosing on Rumours. [Oct 2025, p.133]
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Aug 27, 2025It's an album that oozes confidence, from the UK’s indie-rock standard-bearers.
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Aug 21, 2025A crisp, often emotional, pop experience, it’s a break with the past while remaining utterly true to the precepts that Wolf Alice forged their success by.
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Aug 20, 2025In the tradition of King’s Tapestry or Stevie Nicks’ Bella Donna, this is a great album about the scary experience of honestly figuring what kind of person you are — and what the world owes you for the hard work you already do.
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Aug 19, 2025Throughout, singer Ellie Roswell is a compelling presence, and the result is Wolf Alice's best yet. [Oct 2025, p.80]
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Aug 28, 2025There are still some brilliant moments, but safety is hard to fully fall for.
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Aug 25, 2025The songs are cleanly produced, if a bit whiplash-inducing. At its worst, The Clearing isn’t quite sure what it’s meant to be, falling into genre tokenization. The early-thirties period Wolf Alice is channeling here is a maze of contradictions and nowhere-leading paths, even when they paint a scene with practiced hands.
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Aug 21, 2025More indicative of the album’s sound as a whole, “Just Two Girls” is warm and nostalgic, a spiritual successor to 2017’s “Beautifully Unconventional.”
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UncutAug 19, 2025A bell-bottomed soft-rock glaze courtesy of Greg Kurstin that gives their new songs real heft - "Bloom Baby Bloom" splits the difference between Spinal Tap and the Carpenters - but leaves some tumbling along like Elton John offcuts. [Oct 2025, p.35]
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Aug 19, 2025The Clearing marks the first signs that Wolf Alice lack the originality that made them so appealing in the first place. It’s a mid-career misstep, one that will hopefully see them regroup and double down on their tender yet abrasive brand of rock and roll.
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Aug 19, 2025‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ had so much going for it. Why couldn’t Wolf Alice apply that level of vision, skill, invention and audaciousness to the rest of The Clearing? As radio friendly as Fleetwood Mac usually were, they didn’t win the world’s respect by holding back timidly for 80 per cent of each album, or being content to let only the vocals do the talking.