On the first night of their UK tour of intimate independent venues, we sat down with Joff and Theo from Wolf Alice to discuss their new album ‘Visions of a Life’ and more…
You’ve just got back from your US tour, how was it?
Theo: It was amazing, it was so nice to be playing stuff from the new record and also to be playing the old tunes as well. The shows were incredible, the people were really cool.
Joff: I feel like we know places now whenever we go back there, it’s getting to the point where we know where the nearest Starbucks is! [laughs]
What made you want to do this tour of intimate venues?
Theo: It’s where we started out, we’re going to be playing some places on this tour where we played 3 years ago when we were just starting out, such as the Westgarth Social Club in Middlesborough. It’s in venues like that where we cut our teeth, I suppose. So to come back and play smaller venues, it allows us to read the way that fans react to the new material, because we’re so much closer to them in these kind of venues. It’s also really fun to play in smaller venues.
Has it been a bit weird not doing festivals this summer?
Theo: It’s been a little bit weird, but quite nice to be honest!
Joff: We haven’t had time to do anything else really, we came from finishing the record, straight into rehearsals, doing promo and then here we are, back on tour!
Theo: So we definitely haven’t been sitting around, we’ve been too busy to have any FOMO… Apart from Glastonbury, where we’ve played the last 3 years. When I saw it all on the telly this year, I really wished I was there.
You debuted a new track called ‘Beautifully Unconventional’ earlier this week, what were the inspirations behind this song?
Theo: That song is really an ode to one of Ellie’s friends, Hannah. It’s an ode to friendship.
Your second album ‘Visions of a Life’ is out in September – how does this record differ from your debut?
Theo: It’s 10 times better!
The 3 singles you’ve put out so far all sound completely different, is that reflective of the record itself?
Joff: There are kind of extremes within the record, so ‘Yuk Foo’ and ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ are very different to each other, but our process is really just focusing on how we can make a song more effective, musically. So if a song needs to be more angry, it ends up like ‘Yuk Foo’ and but with ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’, we wanted something more moody and floaty. It’s really dependent on the song itself.
Theo: Those are two extremes, so when people hear the full record, hopefully they’ll be able to tie things together a bit. But you’d have to buy the record to do that though, out on 29th September, available in all stores and online! [laughs]
As a band you’ve been quite vocal when it comes to politics, and given the dramatic changes we’ve seen over the past 2 years, has it informed your songwriting in any way?
Theo: I don’t think it’s necessarily influenced any of the songwriting, there are no songs directly discussing politics on the album, but for us as people, it’s been great to be able to use our platform to respond to political events. But maybe in the future we’ll make something more directly political. It’s quite hard to write in that way, but as we get older we might become more mature, so who knows?
‘Visions of a Life’ is out now, via Dirty Hit Records
