There’s something almost thankless about being the first proper name on Orange Stage after the christening. The audience is still finding itself, its friends, its beer and the queue it has apparently chosen to devote its life to. Wolf Alice came on in the middle of it all and did something almost provocatively grown-up: they didn’t turn up the chaos. They gave us a breather.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
Orange Stage after the opening concert is always a bit like a home after a big party, where no one has quite decided whether to start tidying up or open another bottle. People drift around. Some are looking for food. Others are looking for people they’ve already lost. There’s excitement, confusion and that festival optimism where everyone says the weather is perfect, even while standing in a queue that has developed its own infrastructure.
This year, a power outage didn’t exactly make things easier either. The queues grew, orientation fell apart, and Orange Stage had to find its pulse again after the opening. Right in the middle of all that, Wolf Alice walked on.
It could hardly have been anything but strange.
Instead, it was very nice.
Orange was far from full. That was actually a little surprising. On paper, Wolf Alice should have been able to pull in more people. One of the most interesting British indie bands of the past decade, Mercury Prize winners, big songs, international weight, the whole package. But maybe it was precisely the slightly open space that suited the concert. Because Wolf Alice are not a band that relies on steamrolling the audience with stadium moves and “come on Roskilde” shouts every third minute.
They’re better when they’re allowed to build slowly.
And that’s what they did. Without seeming lazy. Without becoming too polished. Their music has that British knack for sounding familiar without being retro in the annoying way. Not a bag of nostalgia with a Union Jack on it. More a mood you recognise, but one that still shifts. Dream pop, noise, indie rock, small breakdowns and Ellie Rowsell’s vocals, which at times almost stood alone in the air before the band came crashing back in around her.
There weren’t many grand gestures. Thankfully. Orange Stage can make bands overcompensate, as if everyone suddenly thinks they’re supposed to play a Melodi Grand Prix final for people wearing camping wristbands. Wolf Alice did the opposite. They let the songs take up the space. Not the whole space. Just enough.
“The Last Man on Earth”, “How Can I Make It OK?” and “Smile” worked as small landmarks along the way. Not because they were artificially inflated into Orange-sized numbers. More because they were played with the calm and precision that make the band interesting. They have a rare trust in the material. They don’t stand there trying to sell the songs like second-hand sofas on a classifieds site. They play them, and then it’s up to you to show up inside them.
The whole thing felt a bit like the first week after the summer holidays. You recognise the buildings, the people and the routines, but everything is still slightly shifted. Orange Stage hadn’t quite settled yet. The audience hadn’t quite gathered. The festival was still booting up in the body. And Wolf Alice fit that state strangely well.
When “Don’t Delete the Kisses” closed the concert, everything fell into place. Or maybe it didn’t fall into place at all, which was almost better. The song has always had that uncomfortably precise feeling of an inner monologue you never asked to have set to music. Old messages. People you never wrote back to. That little mental court that opens five minutes after you thought you were fine.
If you believe in Mercury in retrograde, you can probably blame that. I blame Wolf Alice.
Reflection:
Wolf Alice didn’t fill Orange Stage with big gestures. They did something more risky: they trusted the songs. It wasn’t a concert that blew the festival apart, and it wasn’t meant to be. It was a breather. A little air in the system. And in the middle of Roskilde’s first big chaos, that was actually worth quite a lot.
