Wolf Alice joined NME backstage at Glastonbury 2025 to discuss their new album ‘The Clearing’ and reflect on the 10th anniversary of their debut album, ‘My Love Is Cool’. Check out the full interview below and watch some of the video above.
The band were second from top on the Other Stage yesterday (June 29), performing just before The Prodigy for their biggest Glastonbury set so far. It followed a mid-afternoon Pyramid Stage slot in 2022, which the group nearly missed after getting stranded in America.
“That was the worst 48 hours ever,” guitarist Joff Oddie recalled. “So stressful. We missed a flight – or they cancelled a flight going from LA. We were supporting Halsey at the Hollywood Bowl and then we were just in the airport. It was just on a complete knife-edge the whole time. We landed and I think we had three hours until stage or something like that. We were escorted onto site. It was so stressful. Playing was amazing, but god.”
“They promised us a police escort and when we got here, it was literally four lads,” drummer Joel Amey added. “Four lads all in bucket hats and high vises on quad bikes.”
Check out the full chat with Oddie and Amey below.
NME: Hello Wolf Alice. How’s your weekend been so far?
Joel Amey: “Mine’s been good. You know what? This is the second time I’ve done Glastonbury where I’ve not been drinking and I think, controversially, it’s actually not as big as I remember it. That’s my big takeaway. I’ve got around easy peasy. It’s been great and chilled. It was a lot harder in previous years to get from stage to stage.”
Today you’re playing second from top on the Other Stage. You’ve been playing some small shows and other festivals with new music in the set – how’s it been going down so far?
Amey: “I think really well. We’ve played to some really amazing crowds. We’ve been around a few European cities. We’ve been to Ireland playing some smaller towns and they were incredible. We played a song called ‘Thorns’ in Ireland and then we played a song called ‘The Sofa’ in the other towns. And we’ve been playing ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’, so that’s three, and I’ve loved playing them all, and the old songs as well. The new stuff always breathes life into the old stuff so everything feels like a bit of a renewal, especially in the early shows. So it’s been really great.”
Do you feel like your relationship with the older stuff has changed because of the new songs you’ve added into the set?
Amey: “I feel like my relationship with playing music has changed because of the new album. The way I personally choose to perform or even the way I choose to play the drums, has been informed by the experience of making ‘The Clearing’. You look back on old things and you’re like, ‘Oh, why do I play it like that? I could play it like this’. So it’s always evolving in that sense.”
You mentioned ‘The Clearing’ there, which is out in August. How would you say ‘Blue Weekend’ and the response to songs like ‘Delicious Things’ influenced this album?
Joff Oddie: “I think very much. I think we were buoyed by the songier songs being things that people really connected to and we spent a lot more time working on those constituency, songy song parts of the songs. It’s the hardest thing in the world to write a really concise song in a – I don’t wanna say pop structure, but you know what I mean. It’s quite easy to throw a five-minute jam together, but that’s so difficult, so it’s a brilliant challenge and that’s more so where we were focused with this album.”
Joel, you wrote a song on the album called ‘White Horses’…
Oddie: “It’s really good!”
It’s so good. What can you tell us about the story behind that song?
Amey: “Thanks, Joffy. It’s about my family, actually. We’d kind of done writing for ‘The Clearing’ in the tail end of whatever year it was, and I was really influenced by what the other three had been doing. That was the main sonic influence, which was we had loads of acoustic guitars and harmonies and stuff like that. But I felt like I would love to have something that had a bit more of a dance – not dance music, because I’m going to do a disservice when you listen to it – but that kind of propulsion and moving forward. I wanted to get a song like that and see if I could make a hybrid of the two.
“So I had a demo that was like that, that had me doing some vocals on. Yeah, it’s a song about my family, about my history. In the overarching sense of ‘The Clearing’, we were saying a lot of these songs are like a moment of peace, where you know that maybe there’s more forest to go through, and ‘White Horses’ is a little bit like that where it’s a moment of reflection on myself, where I’ve come from and maybe where I’m going, but without necessarily answering it.”
Earlier this month marked 10 years of ‘My Love Is Cool’…
Amey: “And we were here with you! Do you want to make us feel old?!”
We were all together! What are your memories of releasing that album?
Oddie: “Memories? Not a lot! It was so much fun, though, wasn’t it? I honestly don’t have many memories.”
Amey: “I do remember driving to Glastonbury in [tour manager] Johnny Haskett’s beat-up people carrier, eating Magnum ice creams in the car. We were Number One in the [mid-week] charts at the time and everyone on site was like ‘Ohhh!’ We woke up on Sunday and we were Number Two in the charts and everyone was more chill around us after that. Before, everyone was like, ‘Pint? Pint?’ On Sunday, everyone was like, ‘No’.”
NME gave Wolf Alice’s Glastonbury 2025 performance five stars, writing: “The energy they pour into today’s set feels like that of a band who should be topping the Pyramid Stage next time they play Worthy Farm. As the set ends with ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ – a strong contender for one of the best, most dizzyingly accurate love songs ever written – that feeling only intensifies. That song finds Rowsell writing herself a romantic Hollywood ending; Wolf Alice’s world-beating set does the same for Glastonbury 2025.”
Elsewhere, the festival was headlined by The 1975, who appeared to tease a new era at the end of their set, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo. The latter was joined on stage during her performance by The Cure’s Robert Smith to cover two of the band’s songs.
Secret sets across the weekend came from Lorde, who performed her new album ‘Virgin’ in full, Lewis Capaldi, who completed his Glastonbury 2023 set on the Pyramid Stage, and Haim, who celebrated their new record ‘I Quit’. Pulp were also revealed as the mystery band behind the pseudonym Patchwork.
Check back at NME here for the latest news, reviews, interviews, photos and more from Glastonbury 2025.