The Camden band are all the rage, especially with their teen fanbase, thanks to a blend of big guitars and folk stylings. They talk about their quest for heaviness

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I’m in the Hawley Arms in Camden Town with an up-and-coming guitar band and we’re discussing the merits of MySpace. Not because we’ve fallen through a crack in the space-time continuum, but because the infamous pub – a byword for the latter-day excesses of the mid-00s indie scene – is where Wolf Alice choose to hang out. On the one hand, this feels a bit incongruous, because Wolf Alice are a hip guitar band in their early 20s, and Camden Town has these days deteriorated in the collective consciousness into a deeply untrendy indie landfill site, the eternal regret-ridden Sunday morning to the intoxicating, scratchy guitar-soundtracked Saturday night of 10 years before.

Yet, in a funny way, it does all fit with Wolf Alice’s kind of cool: one that clearly doesn’t entail being in the right place at the right time. The band have already spent three years being touted as the next big thing but, far from people losing interest, nowadays they’re more hyped than ever.

All of us spent our formative years amid the mid-2000s indie rock explosion, MySpace being part of that experience (“I used to judge people based on what was on their little player!”; “You could see what internet gang you were part of!”). Indie might be a bit of a dirty word nowadays, an alarmingly tragic spectre playing a scratchy guitar and wearing “three different belts and one white winklepicker and a black one” (which is how bassist Theo Ellis envisages it), but back then it was exciting and aspirational. It also spawned a small teen culture in London, centred around underage gigs, with bands on the bills who were often teenagers themselves.

“I grew up walking past Nambucca [temple of all-ages indie nights on north London’s Holloway Road] and praying to it,” frontwoman Ellie Rowsell says wistfully. Ellis and drummer Joel Amey, meanwhile, first befriended each other at an all-ages gig at Camden’s Purple Turtle.

“Those all-ages nights were the most important thing that happened to me and music,” says Amey. “It was my musical awakening. You could see bands like These New Puritans and Late Of The Pier,” he continues, prompting a chorus of post-Libertines London indie from his bandmates: “Dustin’s Bar Mitzvah, Vincent Vincent And The Villains, Larrikin Love, Mystery Jets, the Holloways!”

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Guitar music was exhilarating then (though I was a teenager too, so not a particularly reliable witness), and I’m reminded of those days when I go to a Wolf Alice show. At the sold-out Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the moshpit heaves with teenagers screaming the lyrics to as-yet unreleased album tracks memorised from fan YouTube videos. Later in the month, at a tiny homecoming show at The Monarch pub in Camden Town, the combination of overzealous security and being three minutes late leaves me stranded outside with some schoolgirls, who tell me with desperate looks that they can’t get in either and, yes, it is really unfair. There may be no local scene for Wolf Alice to be part of, but it’s clear that they can still generate a fair amount of feverish excitement by themselves.

In fact, the band’s reach goes beyond the headbanging teenagers of the front five rows. Over the past few years, Wolf Alice have established a sizeable fanbase thanks to a near-constant stream of singles and EP releases, in which softly-spoken melodies erupt into a clamour of hammering percussion, crashing guitars and siren-like riffs. Their loud/quiet tendencies have earned them a reputation as grunge revivalists, but a truer explanation of their sound is provided by the band’s video for early single Fluffy. In it, Rowsell and guitarist Joff Oddie play a naive folky duo, who upload a breathy acoustic number dedicated to their cat on to the internet. It’s witnessed by soon-to-be bandmates Amey and Ellis, who are doing rebellious things like lighting matches and drinking milk straight from the bottle. The four join forces, everyone goes electric, and it all ends with Rowsell ceremonially smashing up a computer with a hammer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lupine howls: Ellie onstage in Cambridge, April 2015. Photograph: REX

And that is kind of what happened in reality. Rowsell and Oddie met in 2010, when she “wanted to try playing live but I didn’t really have the confidence to do it on my own”. She continues: “I didn’t have any friends who were in bands or even many who were into indie music.” (“Her group of friends all just went to [London dub club night] Reggae Roast,” adds Ellis, pointedly.) So Rowsell and her dad, eager to help out, started scouring internet forums where musicians showcase their skills to potential bandmates. There they found a video of Oddie playing guitar. He was at teacher-training college in south-west London, and apparently just as far from the nearest likeminded person. He admits he used to be embarrassed to have met Rowsell via the musical equivalent of a lonely hearts ad, “but so many bands back in the day put an advert in the NME,” he says.

“Kim Deal and Frank Black met that way,” volunteers Rowsell, in reference to the Pixies’ origins.

“Why put an advert on the post office wall when you could do it online?” says Oddie.

“You’d definitely end up with the wrong band if you put an advert in the post office,” deadpans Ellis.

Oddie and Rowsell started playing open-mic nights, and spending their time “listening to Johnny Flynn and being very twee”. But by 2012 they felt as if things were going nowhere, and decided to recruit friends-of-friends Amey and Ellis to form a proper band. The former had been busy fronting Guildford synth-pop band Mafia Lights, while Ellis was making “beatsy” electronic-based tracks. But what came out of them as a four-piece was surprisingly heavy, something Oddie attributes to “boredom on everyone’s parts”. Nowadays, on record at least, the band say they’ve mellowed from those days, or “got to a nice, boring middle ground”, as Oddie puts it.

“Finally,” sighs Joel, “the middle of the road!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beer Wolf: the band photographed in Camden, June 2015. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Wolf Alice are useless at talking themselves up. At one point Ellis tells me, apparently in earnest, that they want to be “mildly unique” (“Yeah, only mildly unique, just mildly,” chorus his bandmates). But the band have created something that feels unfamiliar. When Frank Black wrote that famous small ad, he said he was looking for somebody into both Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul & Mary. Pixies didn’t actually end up combining the driving momentum and spitting fury of their hardcore punk influences with folk. Wolf Alice do.

Their debut album, My Love Is Cool, opens with Turn To Dust, which has Rowsell’s mannered phrasing conjuring up visions of somebody singing Scarborough Fair in the 1950s. Minutes later, though, she’s screaming about someone being “a dirty fucker” over an onslaught of noise, and cackling so diabolically she makes James Hetfield sound like Joni Mitchell. Elsewhere, those two extremes are fused together in mercurial songs that oscillate between cool control and thunderous abandon. The band namecheck Jack White’s High Ball Stepper and Inhaler by Foals as inspiration for the massiveness they were trying to achieve.

This heaviness is put to cathartic ends. On earlier songs the noise provides a release, while lyrics describe an adolescent feeling of being ill at ease in your own skin; from She (about “a girl wanting to be a different girl,” says Rowsell) to Moaning Lisa Smile, a song inspired by Lisa Simpson’s growing pains..She says what connects the songs on My Love Is Cool is the idea of a “coming of age” but “not like 16, more like the wobbly ages, like 18 to 20…” She falters for a second. “Probably 20-whatever.” There is a sense of the band emerging into adulthood and realising they can’t escape the feeling of being trapped. The response is less self-destruction, more self-negation: apparent in the lyrics of Silk, in which Rowsell’s protagonist tells us “my loving kills me slowly”, and clear just from the titles of Turn To Dust and Your Love’s Whore.

There’s a sense of progression, which is odd for a debut album, but Wolf Alice have done their growing up in public. Not for them the snapping up and cloistering away by a record company before establishing their sound: they’ve been plugging away on the live circuit and releasing singles independently for about as long as you can get away with these days if you’re as talented as they are.

In fact, it was only last year, when the group signed an actual record deal, that things picked up enough for them to give up their day jobs. Oddie had been working as a supply teacher, Rowsell in a denim repair shop, while Ellis spent what sounds like a very confused stint working as a “mannequin”, which I eventually establish means he worked as an in-house model for a designer. “But obviously no one’s taking pictures of my face because I’m not good-looking enough,” he sighs. “It’s like modelling for the radio. It was mad demoralising.” “Secret modelling!” pile in his bandmates. “You can’t go outside!”

That must seem like a long time ago now. Recently returned from the US – they’ll fly out again in August amid a packed festival season – the band have just announced their biggest-ever headline tour, with a date booked at Brixton Academy in September.

“I didn’t think we were going to play it so soon; that’s the kind of thing you expect to play at the end of your career,” says Rowsell.

“Or like the final gig you play as a band!” says Oddie, as the group finally allow themselves to admit to a bit of hard-earned success. It lasts about three seconds.

“To be fair,” Amey chips in cheerily, “that could still happen.” Maybe not the middle of the road then, but the beginning.

My Love Is Cool is out on 22 June via Dirty Hit Records

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alice band: the four-piece photographed in Camden, June 2015. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian



