Wolf Alice: 2025

This  FUV Live session is also available as a podcast, "FUV Live Sessions." We're elevating WFUV's long history of live sessions and interviews via a podcast that you can find on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

Hard to believe it's been a full decade since London's Wolf Alice first visited WFUV for a session, ahead of their debut album, My Love is Cool. After four acclaimed albums, four EPs, and innumerable singles, the quartet— lead singer, guitarist, and pianist Ellie Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist  Theo Ellis and drummer and vocalist Joel Amey — have ascended as one of the most revered rock bands out of Britain, positively riveting live and equally savvy in the studio. Rowsell's soprano is astonishing, adroitly soaring and swooping like a windborne kestrel, vacillating between pensive tenderness and an unbridled savagery.

At the time of this FUV Live conversation with Wolf Alice at New York's Power Station at BerkleeNYC, it was not quite a month since the band had released their fourth album, The Clearing, which vaulted to the peak of the UK album charts its first week. It was also shortlisted for a Mercury Prize, the fourth such nomination for the quartet, the first band to be shortlisted for every one of their albums.

Wolf Alice had already won the Mercury Prize for 2018's Visions of a Life, but they were pretty chuffed to be recognized again (the award would eventually go to Sam Fender's People Watching). On this rainy September day of this new FUV Live session,  Rowsell, Ellis and Amey were at the start of their 2025 North American tour, joined on this trip by Genghar's John Victor on lead guitar while Oddie was on paternity leave.

Producer Greg Kurstin worked with Wolf Alice on The Clearing, and they experimented with a panorama of '70s-era flourishes that wouldn't sound out of place on records by Harry Nilsson, Electric Light Orchestra, Fleetwood Mac, and even ABBA. For The Clearing, Ellis explained that the "spine of the piano" took the lead in the band's early demos, something that Kurstin, a pianist himself, found appealing.

For their Power Station set, touring keyboardist Ryan Malcolm was stuck in Philadelphia nursing a bad cold, so Rowsell, Ellis, Amey and Victor improvised with two keyboard-free songs — a cuss-free version of "The Sofa" and a stripped-back version of "Leaning Against the Wall."

Rowsell spoke about the revelatory "Play It Out," which grapples with having children — or not — and Amey discusses his duet with Rowsell, the flat-out gallop of "White Horses." Notably, the three friends spoke of their love, admiration, and respect for one another, as they've passed from their 20s to their 30s, and how Wolf Alice continues to reinvent themselves with that deep affection as their artistic ballast. As Rowsell puts it, they celebrate the fun of it all.

[Recorded: 9/17/25; Engineered by Matthew "Sully" Sullivan for the Power Station; produced by Meghan Suma. On-site producer Kara Manning. Thanks to RCA Records and East City Management]