Wolf Alice, one of Britain’s most revered bands and winner of the Mercury Prize 2018 for their last album Visions Of A Life, today announce their highly-anticipated third album, Blue Weekend, due for release on 11 June via Liberator Music / Dirty Hit. The first glimpse into this new world, ‘The Last Man On Earth’ was premiered as Annie Mac’s Hottest Record in the World on BBC Radio 1, continuing a tradition started when Annie played ‘Giant Peach’ from the band’s Gold-certified debut LP My Love Is Cool, as her first song when taking over the the weekday evening show in 2015.
Elaborating on who the titular The Last Man on Earth is, singer and guitarist for Wolf Alice Ellie Rowsell says,
“It’s about the arrogance of humans. I’d just read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and I had written the line ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god’ in my notes. But then I thought: ‘Uh, your peculiar travel suggestion isn’t a dancing lesson from god, it’s just a travel suggestion! Why does everything need to mean something more?””
Wolf Alice are Ellie Rowsell (vocals, guitar), Joff Oddie (guitar, vocals), Theo Ellis (bass) and Joel Amey (drums, vocals). It has been a decade since the band began as a duo of Ellie Rowsell and Joff Oddie, then later expanding to a four-piece, with Joel Amey and Theo Ellis joining the group. Since then, the band saw their 2015 debut album My Love Is Cool soar to #2 on the UK charts, their sophomore album Visions Of A Life win the 2018 Hyundai Mercury prize, and a GRAMMY nomination for Best Rock Performance. The band played a massive 187 shows on the Visions Of A Life world tour – including a sold out Alexandra Palace, 2 sold out dates at Brixton Academy, and a set on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.
It was no surprise that creating a follow-up to Visions Of A Life was a daunting task. The record was a huge success, which subsequently led to many months spent on tour – with intercontinental flights, hotels and long-bus journeys taking a toll on the band.
The band decamped to an Airbnb in Somerset, and it was here that they reconfigured who they were together, far away from festival stages, tour buses, awards shows, and fans. They cemented their friendship and set to work on some fledgling demos in a converted church. These demos evolved into Blue Weekend, a record produced by Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Björk, Brian Eno, Florence + The Machine) who has aided the band in refining their sound to an even sharper point. Rowsell’s personal storytelling is at the core of Blue Weekend, an album that sees Wolf Alice embrace a newfound boldness and vulnerability in equal measure.
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