Wolf Alice stormed the Brooklyn Paramount Friday night, Sept. 19, their fifth stop on The Clearing tour. The room felt like it had slipped back into 1976, golden haze, flared edges, glitter sweat. They’ve leaned hard into the ’70s look this cycle, but it isn’t nostalgia. It’s a knife, sharpened and gleaming.
They began with Thorns, a haunted hymn. It drifted over the crowd like a smoky haze in a bar, low and deliberate, setting the tone for a night that would be equal parts fury and grace. Then they cracked into Your Loves Whore, the early hit, still as raw as the first time. And by Formidable Cool, the hook was deep.
Ellie Roswell stood at the center. A figure of contradictions. Bad and beautiful, detached and magnetic. She wore a gold jumpsuit, shimmering under the lights, blue shadow glaring. She looked like a woman stepping out of another decade.
The new record, The Clearing, is a mirror turned toward the women in the crowd. These songs speak to the selves girls are told to hide, the selves they don’t always show. Just Two Girls, a sugar-dipped track about envy, desire, and the sharp edges of female friendship or more. Roswell kicked off her boots for Play It Out, an aching meditation on what makes a woman “enough.” Is it art? Is it motherhood? Is it survival? And then came The Sofa. The song that will be an anthem for all women. It is every girl at once, the saint, the sinner, the lover, the liar, the dreamer, the destroyer. The Sofa is the place where those multitudes rest together. Where a beauty queen and wild thing sit side by side. Where the private self and the public mask collapse into one voice. Roswell sang, and the crowd roared it back, as if confessing the same truth: a girl is never one thing.
The main set closed there, with that communion. But they returned for Moaning Lisa Smile, Don’t Delete the Kisses, the love song that still cuts deep, still feels like the quiet secret written in the margins of a diary. When the last notes rang out, the band waved, but the crowd didn’t move. They lingered, unwilling to let go, hoping for one more song. The lights came on, but the feeling stayed.
Photos by Jenna Murray
LISTEN TO “The Clearing”: