There is a moment near the end of the title track — seven and a half minutes in, when the whole thing has already crashed and rebuilt itself twice — where Ellie Rowsell just holds a note and lets the guitars decide the rest, and you realize you’ve been holding your breath since the second chorus.
Visions of a Life is the second album from Wolf Alice, recorded in late 2016 and early 2017 at Assault & Battery Studios in London with producer Justin Hill, and it sounds like a band who finally stopped worrying whether they were allowed to be this big.
The Room They Built
Hill had worked with the band on their debut My Love Is Cool, but here the collaboration feels more like a shared conviction. He and engineer Ole Evenrude gave the drums — Joel Amey, who is an underrated reason this record works at all — enormous, compressed space without making them sound produced. They breathe. Joff Oddie’s guitars are layered but never tidy; there’s always something slightly unresolved in the mid-range, like a word you can’t quite hear.
Bassist Theo Ellis locks in with Amey in a way that owes more to shoegaze than to anything post-punk. The low end on “Sadboy” and “Heavenward” doesn’t announce itself. It just fills the room when you’re not looking.
Rowsell wrote most of these lyrics alone, and it shows in the specific uncomfortable way that good solitary writing does. “Beautifully Unconventional” skips over its own profundity; “Don’t Delete the Kisses” is four minutes of interior monologue that has no business being this precise about how it feels to want something you’re afraid to name.
What Separates This from the Debut
My Love Is Cool was a very good record made by a band still finding the right proportions. Visions of a Life is the same band after they stopped asking permission. The dynamic range alone — from the almost-folk of “Sadboy” to the genuine, unironic enormity of “Visions of a Life” — is the kind of thing that takes confidence, or recklessness, or both.
The production never smooths that contrast out. Hill keeps the quiet tracks genuinely quiet, which makes the loud tracks feel earned rather than deployed. That’s harder to do than it sounds. Most records with this kind of ambition either compress everything up to meet the peaks or let the peaks go soft to protect the listener. This one doesn’t protect the listener.
“St. Purple & Green” is probably the moment that catches first-time listeners off guard. It starts like a lullaby and then remembers what album it’s on. Rowsell’s voice doubles and spreads across the stereo field and Oddie’s guitar arrives from a direction you weren’t watching.
The title track closes everything. It is nine minutes long and it earns every one of them — which is a thing I am not often willing to say and mean. It was recorded nearly live in the room, the band playing together rather than tracking separately, and you can feel the edges of that decision in the way the sections find each other. There’s a looseness inside the tightness that a more careful session wouldn’t have allowed.
This is the album Wolf Alice were always supposed to make. Some bands get there. These four did.