"You can join us if you think you're wild," Ellie Rowsell sang on "Freazy." "You can join us if you're a feral child."
Many like minds answered the call. Since Wolf Alice's debut album My Love Is Cool was released back in 2015, they received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance for their Top 10 Alternative single "Moaning Lisa Smile," were named one of Rolling Stone's 10 New Artists You Need To Know, had several headline tours and performed at major festivals including Coachella and Lollapalooza. That is on top of all of their achievements in their home base of the UK, which include a debut at No. 2 in the UK charts, nominations for the prestigious Mercury Prize and a Brit Award, winning the NME Award for Best Live Band and a campaign that culminated in a Gold certified album. Add to that the mother of all global tours, which saw them crisscross the UK, the US, Australia, Japan and Europe, their song "Silk" appearing on the Trainspotting sequel T2, and being selected to be the musical heart of 24 Hour Party People director Michael Winterbottom's fictionalized documentary On The Road that premiered at the 2017 SXSW film festival, and that adds up to the sort of success that many young bands must wait years to achieve.
"The past two years were such amazing highs and then really extreme lows that you've never encountered before," says Ellie. "That's this album." It's such disorientating details, miniature epiphanies and tiny apocalypses from an extreme ride and the lull that came after, that make up Wolf Alice's second record, Visions Of A Life.
It's the classic story. You slog your ass off to make your debut, you tour like a demon, you hit the heights, you get no sleep. Then, when you finally come off the road, you come home to an empty house. "There's some extremely concentrated emotional fluctuation," says bassist Theo Ellis.
Instead of floundering or foundering, Wolf Alice channeled their restless energy into a forward motion. "On the first record maybe we were trying to hold back certain aspects, stylistic things," says guitarist Joff Oddie. "With this one, we thought 'we can do what we want.'"
"It's a weird thing," says Theo. "I hope I'm not jinxing it by saying this but we really do spend a lot of time together... we know each other so well, intricately well, more than you would have in marriage. It's so close that it almost takes on a new state rather than like a relationship or like a friendship. Maybe it's not very necessarily healthy..."
If it sounds this good, how can it be wrong? Here's to Wolf Alice, a reason for downhearted feral children to keep faith with the future.