Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Once the whirlwind of your twenties is behind you and you step into your thirties, a new kind of calm often arrives. Those earlier years are spent stumbling through adulthood, figuring out your identity and chasing what you think you want through messy trial and error. By the time you cross that threshold, you’ve built a stronger sense of who you are, and you finally get the chance to pause and enjoy the wisdom earned through the chaos.
The Clearing, Wolf Alice’s luminous fourth record, captures that very stage, a moment of stillness, self-knowledge, and a break from youthful turbulence, even with the awareness that life will always hold more disorder before the end. It is an album that gathers everything the group has learned across their career and pushes it forward with the kind of poise and mastery that only come with time and growth.
After the reaction to Blue Weekend’s “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man On Earth,” the band felt encouraged to lean more heavily into what guitarist Joff Oddie earlier told NME were “more song-y songs.” The Clearing replaces Wolf Alice’s brash, fast-paced side with tracks that are layered, intricate, and slower in tempo. These pieces may not pummel like “Smile” or “Play The Greatest Hits,” yet the strength of the songwriting ensures they land just as powerfully.
The opener “Thorns” acts as a companion piece to “The Last Man On Earth,” both musically and thematically, driven again by piano. While the 2021 track examined society’s obsession with seeing ourselves in the art we consume, this time, Ellie Rowsell narrows the focus inward. “Did it help to take the thorn out / Telling the whole world you’d been hurt,” she sneers, reflecting on the impulse to broadcast personal pain through her music.
There are gentle nods to earlier eras throughout. “Passenger Seat” carries a loose Americana rhythm that recalls “Leaving You,” one of their earliest cuts. “Midnight Song” takes cues from Visions Of A Life’s “After The Zero Hour,” yet stretches toward something more delicate and expansive. Rather than rehashing past ideas, the band stays true to their roots while allowing their sound to expand.
Across Wolf Alice’s 15 years, a constant thread has been Rowsell’s sharp eye for writing about love and life in all its forms. On The Clearing, she is sharper than ever, channeling affirmations of female friendship on the sunny pop of “Just Two Girls” (“I said you’re so right and you’re so wise”) and reflecting on time, the body, and society’s expectations of women on “Play It Out.”
“Leaning Against The Wall” adds another love song to their catalogue, less dizzying than “Don’t Delete The Kisses,” but warm and immersive enough to sweep you into its orbit. “You put my world in slo-mo,” Rowsell whispers as Oddie’s delicate fingerpicking fades into glimmering synths. “You put my name up in lights.”
But The Clearing is not solely Rowsell’s triumph. Drummer Joel Amey takes the lead on “White Horses,” his first time fronting a song since My Love Is Cool’s “Swallowtail.” It is a moving meditation on identity, family, and heritage, framed by shades of folk and psych, with Amey and Rowsell joining together to sing: “Know who I am, that’s important to me.”
The Clearing is an album that could only have been written once the dust of your twenties has settled and the perspective of your thirties comes into view. It is, as songs like “Bread Butter Tea Sugar” and “The Sofa” make clear, a record that embraces imperfection and finds beauty in it. “Don’t want a dish without salt / Bread without butter / If it’s bad for me, good, I feel bad suits me better,” Rowsell sings on the former. Just as people hope to grow wiser with age, Wolf Alice proves with each release that they continue to outdo themselves, and here, they lift their standard even higher.
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For as long as we’ve known Taylor Swift, she’s played many roles, the songwriter and the storyteller, the narrator and the main character. In the last two years, she’s become both the tortured poet and the billionaire showgirl. Her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department captured her deepest heartbreak, which unfolded alongside her greatest victories: the record-breaking Eras Tour, her long fight to reclaim her master recordings, and a whirlwind romance with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce. Never one to take it easy, she began her next project by saying, “I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons.”
Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is anything but reserved. She opens with “The Fate of Ophelia,” a love story that lifts her away from heartbreak, not into a fairytale, but out of tragedy. On The Tortured Poets Department, she spent thirty-one songs writing her way through sorrow. Here, she seems to undo it all in just one.
The melancholy that colored her last four records is mostly gone, yet The Life of a Showgirl still feels surprisingly understated. Swift reunites with pop powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback for the first time in eight years, crafting arrangements built around crisp ’70s soft-rock drums and minimalist hip-hop beats reminiscent of Pure Heroine. The songs focus heavily on her voice and lyrics, but they don’t quite capture the lush emotional nuance she found in her collaborations with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Outside of “Ophelia,” the other clear radio contender is “Opalite,” a breezy pop-rock track that recalls Red-era songs like “Message in a Bottle.” The difference is that 2012 Taylor never would have started a love song with lines as biting as, “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash.’”
For the starry-eyed young Taylor, romance used to be the lens through which she saw everything. Now in her mid-thirties, she still portrays love as pure, but her stories come with more complications. The acoustic ballad “Eldest Daughter” begins with her guarded and detached, then gradually opening up as the song unfolds. The narrative works, but it also shows the album’s smaller emotional scope: she gives the same weight to romantic vulnerability as she does to frustrations about the internet.
That’s about as serious as Showgirl gets, in fact, it might be her funniest record yet, depending on how much you’re laughing with her. On “Father Figure,” she playfully references George Michael while poking fun at her feud with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, singing, “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger!” Then there’s “Wood,” her first attempt at disco, which channels The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” and Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.” It’s a cheeky, joyful track that nods to her fiancé’s prowess both in life and in love. “Wi$h Li$t” is equally over-the-top, think “Royals” rewritten by someone who’s as close to American royalty as you can get, yet its domestic fantasy somehow feels sweet and genuine.
When Swift stops trying to prove anything and simply exists within her music, the magic comes back. “Ruin the Friendship,” like “Betty,” captures the innocence of a teenage crush that lingers into adulthood. “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist / Over his shoulder I catch a glimpse,” she sings, as memories of missed chances fade into a funeral decades later. Then, in the present, she mourns what could’ve been: “It was not convenient, no / But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway.’” Swift’s greatest gift, the one at the heart of the Eras Tour, has always been her ability to make a song feel like a lived memory, no matter how many times you hear it.
But by the next track, “Actually Romantic,” she’s back in character, reviving her “Blank Space” persona to seemingly take aim at Charli XCX. Over a grungy Pixies/Weezer-inspired beat, she taunts, “It sounded nasty but it feels like you’re flirting with me / I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kind of making me… wet!” The jab feels random, especially given the references to Charli’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” the “CANCELLED!” lyrics on this album, and their supposed reconciliation on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. Maybe she wrote it just to amuse herself.
The closing title track nearly ties everything together. Featuring Sabrina Carpenter, Swift tells the story of an aging showgirl named Kitty who warns her about the ruthless world of fame. By the song’s end, Taylor flips the narrative, claiming her own power: “I’m immortal now, baby dolls!” She’s still marked by the battles she’s fought, but she didn’t have to lose herself to win, and she hasn’t shut the door on those who come after her. Like Elizabeth Taylor, the world might gossip about her personal life, but history will remember her career, exactly as she intended.
When Michael Jackson passed away, TIME Magazine wrote, “In the theater of celebrity tragedy, each play has three acts.” Having escaped Ophelia’s fate, Taylor Swift now finds herself in her fifth. She’s still a fascinating main character, though her focus has shifted to life under the microscope of social media. Meanwhile, outside her kingdom, the world continues to face crises, from climate change to political unrest and humanitarian disasters.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking escape, but the best pop music makes personal emotion feel like everything is at stake. Speak Now, Reputation, Folklore, her most powerful albums transformed her pain into something universal. For the first time, The Life of a Showgirl finds Taylor Swift not growing through love, but resting comfortably within it.
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