Just weeks after announcing their fourth album ‘The Clearing’ (originally set for release on August 29, but will now arrive a week earlier, on August 22), Wolf Alice return with ‘The Sofa’, a slow-burning, cinematic second single that proves the band are unafraid to embrace quiet as power.

Produced again by Greg Kurstin, ‘The Sofa’ marks a bold pivot from the pop-rock theatricality of ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ that kicked off the era. 

Piano-led and slow-building, the track lets Ellie Rowsell's voice take up quiet space. The lyrics are raw and plainspoken, skimming the surface of ambition, frustration, and peace with the tension of someone who once wanted to escape but no longer needs to. There’s no grand reinvention here, only the kind of transformation that happens when you stop running. “Didn’t make it out to California / Where I thought I might clean the slate,” she sings, her tone unbothered. “Feels a little like I’m stuck in Seven Sisters / Oh, England / And maybe that’s OK.”

The duality is constant: wanting more and being content, wanting sex and love and nothing at all. In lyrics like “Let me lie here on the sofa / Sometimes I just want to / be no one thing,” Ellie Rowsell embraces simple human truths. As she reflects on being in her late 20s, she urges listeners to remain present – to pause, reflect, and accept themselves. 

The chorus doesn’t overreach, it simply lists: “I can be happy, I can be sad / I can be a bitch when I get mad.” There’s no metaphor, no filter, just honesty, delivered with a shrug and a kind of grace.

If ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ placed Rowsell in the spotlight, ‘The Sofa’ lets her lie down in it. She abandons spectacle for stillness, the guitar for a day off, the Axl Rose swagger for something closer to self-acceptance. Her voice now floats above soft piano loops and subtle backing vocals, letting the listener lean in. 

The music video, directed by Fiona Jane Burgess, captures that same quiet strength. It begins in a typical living room with the band performing the song on an actual sofa. As the video unfolds, the sofa becomes a travelling stage, moving through the city, carried from person to person. It appears beneath a group watching football, a gay wedding, beside dancers, joggers, strangers sharing joy. The cast is beautifully, casually diverse: people of all ages, body types, races, and genders – united by this one ordinary object turned magical. It’s both surreal and incredibly real.

There’s something quietly radical about a band like Wolf Alice choosing a song like ‘The Sofa’ to close their album, and to offer it up as a second single. It doesn't try to blow your mind, it eventually asks you to stay in it. “Hope I can accept the wild thing in me,” Rowsell repeats at the beginning and the end. And she means it not as a mission, but as a quiet wish.

If the first single was the bloom, this one is the root – steady, deep, and unmistakably human. Where ‘The Clearing’ is about emerging from chaos with something softer in your hands,‘The Sofa’ is the exhale at the end of that journey. Not triumphant, not tragic – just here. And sometimes, that’s enough.

There’s power in softness, rebellion in staying put, and poetry in lying on the couch. So let yourself lie down on the sofa too, and enjoy the slow, gentle ride back home.

Lydia Sedda
@inlydseyes
Image: Rachel Fleminger Hudson

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