Wolf Alice is back. On Wednesday (February 24), the English rockers announced their third album, Blue Weekend, and shared its orchestral lead single, "Last Man On Earth."
“It’s about the arrogance of humans,” singer Ellie Rowsell said in a statement about the song's lyrics. “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?’”
Blue Weekend is the follow-up to Wolf Alice's Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize-winning sophomore album Visions of a Life. After that whirlwind album cycle, the band retreated to an Airbnb in Somerset, UK to “reconfigure who they were together” and recorded demos in a converted church. The album was produced by Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Björk, Brian Eno, Florence + The Machine) and sees the group exploring new sonic territory.
“This album is for other people,” Rowsell explained. “Sometimes you hear a song and it makes you feel better, or you hear a song and it makes you feel seen. I remember feeling blue about something, and thinking, ‘I wonder what songs I can listen to that will be about what I’m feeling right now.’”
“It was almost as if I was desperate to feel better about something, and I would go down any path to feel not alone in something, or to understand it more," she continued. "And I’ve never really done that before intentionally, I’d never really sought it out.”
Blue Weekend is slated for a June 11 release and can be pre-ordered here. Listen to "Last Man On Earth" above.
Photo: Jordan Hemingway