There’s a new mood sweeping through British guitar music – a quiet swagger, a retiring sense of confidence born through the simple of fact of knowing your own worth.
Take Wolf Alice. A four piece – Ellie Rowsell, Joel Amey, Theo Ellis and Joff doncha know – the group have only been together a short time. Yet earlier this week the group found the time to premiere their debut single 'Fluffy' on Radio 1 and play an already infamous show at East London sweatpit the Old Blue Last.
Listening to the single itself, that sense of confidence is almost writ large from the get go. Those opening drum cracks, the leering guitar and lunging bass give way to vocals that shred through the speakers.
Wolf Alice capture that quiet-LOUD dynamic that Pixies made their own, but add a little something of their own. There’s a nod towards Riot Grrrl – Bikini Kill, even Huggy Bear – while the pop edge could come straight from Buzzcocks’ chord book.
But this isn’t some cache of cool influences. Rather Wolf Alice seem like a group of kids in London, looking around them and transmitting what they see through guitar-bass-drum-vocals. It’s been done before, it’ll be done again. But it will rarely be done with such effortless style, panache and – above all – confidence.
Listen to it now.
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'Fluffy' is set to be released February 11th through Chess Club Records,
