It’s a move compounded by circumstance: trapped in a residential recording studio by the Covid pandemic, the band opted to spend their time polishing an album they had previously thought was virtually finished. The producer’s chair is occupied by Markus Dravs, whose CV – Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine – suggests that he’s very much the kind of guy you phone if you find your ambitions extending a little further than your present status. It’s a recipe for a certain level of success, but Blue Weekend is fairly obviously a lunge for something bigger. There’s something there for the 16-year-olds and the BBC Radio 6 Music listeners who remember when the O2 Forum was called the Town and Country Club. Their influences are deftly applied, but audible enough to attract an audience who recall this stuff first time around. Equally, their most obvious musical references points – shoegazing and grunge, a touch of Elastica about their punkier moments – largely date from the early 90s. The 2017 tour documentary On the Road made being in Wolf Alice look like a job, a monotonous, gruelling round of faintly underwhelming experiences that director Michael Winterbottom compared to “a horrific form of camping”. Nor are they a band who have bought into time-honoured rock mythology suggesting a life more glamorous, weird, transgressive and exciting than your own. Her lyrics tend to deal in the everyday frustrations of twentysomething life whether in character or not, it comes as a mild shock to hear her singing about accepting any drugs she’s offered in Los Angeles on Blue Weekend’s Delicious Things. For all the attention from Vogue – “ Here’s How An It Brit Does Glastonbury Style” – Rowsell seems noticeably more “older sister’s famously cool mate” than “rock star blessed with otherworldly charisma”. On the face of it, they seem like a very 2020s kind of band, built for a pop world in which relatability and mild aspiration is more important than glamour and the selling of dreams.
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