The single "Favourite Song" was released on October 23 and announces itself as the work of a woman who has been to a very dark place and has come back with her boots on. She is a singer, songwriter and producer who dresses her records in the costume of a fictional character, half rock star and half fever dream. On paper that sounds like a recipe for pretension. On record it sounds like a gleeful assault on good manners. The voice is haunting, the guitars are distorted to the point of menace, and the electronics creak and hiss like a haunted lift. Underneath it all runs a hypnotic melody, the sort that gets into the bloodstream and refuses to leave.
The song's bravest conceit is its choice of ghost. The song at the heart of this tale of theft is Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", which is a bold thing to touch given how many hands have already worn it smooth. Most of those hands have treated it as a hymn to be sung reverently, preferably with a candle and a lump in the throat. WØLFFE treats it as a weapon. Its famous refrain begins the song as a sneer, a cold dismissal from someone who has taken everything and wants you to know it. By the end, through a feat of lyrical jiu-jitsu, the same word has flipped into a roar of triumph. The cruelty of the first verse becomes the battle cry of the last. That is the whole record in miniature, and it is thrilling to watch.
This is storytelling as much as sound, and the story has a proper shape. The opening has the claustrophobia of a bedsit at three in the morning, all bruised vocals and a mood of slow, creeping dread. Then the track starts to climb, and the destruction hardens into resolve. By the closing stretch it has become a full-blooded celebration, loud, defiant and fiercely, almost indecently, euphoric. Plenty of artists write about survival. Few make you feel the exact moment the lock gives way.
The influences are worn with intelligence rather than reverence. You can hear Joy Division's grey-skied unease and Björk's talent for turning the strange into the sublime, and you can feel the shadow of David Lynch hanging over the whole enterprise. Kurt Vonnegut's dark humour is in there too, the instinct to laugh at the abyss while staring straight into it. Yet none of it sounds like homage. WØLFFE has the rare gift of absorbing her heroes and digesting them into something that is entirely her own.
She has the credentials to back up the confidence. Her voice has already turned up in everything from Netflix dramas to Sky's Riviera, and she has supported Lauren Mayberry and sold out three London headline shows, so the buzz is no accident. "Favourite Song" also whets the appetite nicely for the forthcoming EP, YUCK, which she is releasing through her own label, CUB Records, in December. If this is the sound of an artist working with full creative control, long may she keep it.
Pop music has always been at its best when it is personal, cinematic and slightly dangerous, and this single is all three at once. It takes a private wound and turns it into a communal shout. By the final bars you will want to throw your own hands in the air and reclaim something of your own, be it a song, a name or a Saturday night. Play it loud, preferably while somebody who wronged you is within earshot.