Wolf Alice. Credit: Jordan Hemingway
After teasing fans of their comeback for the last week, now the Mercury-winners are back with the dreamy and atmospheric ‘The Last Man On Earth’ – an adventurous sonic departure for the band, drifting into an orchestral, latter-day Beatles-esque waltz in the final third as frontwoman Ellie Rowsell sings: “
When your friends are talking, you hardly hear a word – you were the first person here, and the last man on the earth“.
“It’s about the arrogance of humans,” said Rowsell, explaining the 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?’”