“I never saw myself as a singer,” Ellie Rowsell spoke in an interview recently, opening about her epiphany to showcase her vocals as competitive instrument in the band. Since Wolf Alice first formed, Ellie’s vocals seemingly only dares to stand between the spectrum of delicate whispers or full speed head-on screaming. Even in their sophomore, Mercury Prize-winning Visions of A Life, the best tracks are the ones where she was either singing coyly or screaming in rage at the top of her lungs. It felt like she finds her confidence in either singing too shy or too rough. Simply put, Ellie was more comfortable as a guitarist as her main instrument rather than a vocalist.

But this was before Wolf Alice dropped Blue Weekend.

In their third album, Ellie finally explores the strength of her vocals. There is so much versatility in her vocals, reflecting strongly in every track, as she screams in the explosive bar fight anthem “Play the Greatest Hits” to intimate whispering about closure to a painful relationship in “No Hard Feelings” to Kate Bush-inspired “Lipstick on the Glass.” It straight away solidifies her status as one of the most flourishing voices in rock music today.

In the record’s best track, “Delicious Things”, Ellie searches for self-belonging for a home you don’t belong to and feeling homesick for a place too detached to be called a home. It’s a sweet, sweet rendition on success and the longing that comes with it. “I’ll give it a shot for the spot at the top / A girl like me / Would you believe I’m in Los Angeles?” You miss your mother, you miss your first lover. But you are here now, and the scariest place in your dream is still a part of the dream. It’s a glorious depiction of anxiety for being in a place of success. But it’s still the most delicious things, somehow.

Recurring themes of self-discovery, friendship and past lovers are apparent. It’s nothing new in retrospect to the areas of songwriting they have ventured before. But this time, there are so much confidence blasting through in every confusion. “A moment to change it all / Had life before been so slow? / Urgency takes hold / But to live in fear isn’t to live at all,” Ellie asks and answers herself in the record’s fourth single “How Can I Make It OK?” It’s a love letter written for anyone listening; a hidden figure exists to support your back, to showcase your beauty to the world.

Even in “Play the Greatest Hits”, an explosive raging track portraying different personalities all at once, have its fair share of excitement in being half-sober, yet still lingers with self-awareness. It sounds like the more daring sister of “Yuk Foo” – the lead single of their previous album – which is good news, because Wolf Alice sounds their best when they are infuriated. Ellie rages all the way through of the freedom of being who you want to be at the moment, even if it’s far from who you really are inside. “The taste of someone’s lips, hands on hips / Swaying in the kitchen to all the greatest hits,” she sings cheekily, before sonically punches into rage, demanding for the loud music to be louder.

The tinges of quintessential questions while living through quarter life crisis are prominent in each track: Am I doing life right? Is this relationship ever gonna work? Am I as happy as my friends? In the final track “The Beach II”, perhaps the closest they’ve ever been to sounding like their first EP, Ellie acts as the spectator of her friends, assumingly they were at the beach. It’s a dreamy, melancholic track that would fit perfectly for a film’s bittersweet ending. “Skimming stones / I don’t care what floats / When I look out beyond the water / The waves lick our feet, our hands meet,” she sings. There are waves of memories skimming by, only as reminders of what life used to be and what it can be as of now. Was it a happy ending? Hopefully. Wolf Alice doesn’t have all the answers, but they are here to let you whimper in the lows of life, assuring you’ll look back knowing it will be OK, someday.