After fourteen years of silence, the Mancunians have kept all their flamboyance for “A Wave That Will Never Break,” a defiant collection of long-form, sweeping songs.
Nobody had dared to imagine it. The idea that a second album by WU LYF could see the light of day bordered on the unthinkable. And for good reason: at the start of the 2010s, the ascent of the English group’s star was as meteoric as its sudden disappearance. A mere couple of years of existence, dozens of memorable concerts and a first full-length, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (2011), which quickly became a cult classic for an entire generation. WU LYF had been a meteor.
Fallen back into the British indie’s oblivion as quickly as it had appeared, while its intense glow continued to illuminate the memories of others. “And it wouldn’t even matter if this first album were also the last,” predicted JD Beauvallet in these pages. “It was recorded as the primal scream, as the swan song, with a unique intensity. It will stay.” But even if some have made WU LYF a myth, the Mancunians’ second album is now a reality.
“We are not just a screamo band limited to a single register”
One only needs to skim the eight tracks that compose it to reconnect with the final moments of the band, on a familiar title. Back to that fateful episode in November 2012, when the singer Ellery James Roberts announced the collective’s death of his own accord by posting a farewell note on YouTube, accompanied by an ultimate raw composition, Triumph.
Fourteen years later, the unfinished demo is finally wrapped up and WU LYF’s end rewritten. A way for the four Mancunians to reclaim their history, to blow on the embers of the past to reignite the flame and face the future. “Integrating this song into the album is a wink to who we were, but it has been redefined to reflect what we have become,” explains bassist and singer Tom McClung in a remote interview. “Our tastes have obviously evolved and we have changed a lot, but we are also aware of all we accomplished in the past.”
Go Tell Fire to the Mountain had been an instant blaze, a record of incendiary candor, epic and unparalleled. By no means does its successor seek to resemble it. Instead, it offers a renewed incarnation to continue welcoming the authors’ unyielding fighting spirit. Built from several improvisation sessions, revived in 2024 in the back of a bookstore in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and later recorded near Lisbon, Portugal, under the supervision of former half of Spacemen 3 Peter Kember, aka Sonic Boom, A Wave That Will Never Break is a tribute to resilience.
Its mere existence confirms it. “Here is the fight I am leading: not to lose myself in cynicism. For the moment you understand how the world works and its gears, it becomes very easy to end up disillusioned, nihilistic or despairing. But that is stagnation, poison for the soul,” exclaims Ellery James Roberts. “We are not just a screamo band limited to a single register. We pay attention to intensity, and we preserve it for all the moments when it becomes truly necessary.”
Silences and Build-Ups
The enfant terrible of Go Tell Fire to the Mountain had lit the fuse by protesting the loss of their innocence. They rise now with a new wisdom, more measured, to channel their strength. The old organ has almost disappeared, yielding to multiple guitars, aggressive or fluid, floating bodies soaked in psych rock.
As for Ellery James Roberts’s torn vocal, it has become more controlled, laid over long, sweeping songs (Love Your Fate, Robe of Glory, Tib St. Tabernacle) as well as contemplative ones (Wave or Letting Go, a distant echo of Sonic Boom’s Just to See You Smile written for Spacemen 3 in the early 1990s), where ruptures, silences and other climaxes dear to the English follow one another.
“I think we have created a fairly provocative album, which manifests itself on several levels. There is euphoria, regret, a sense of uprooting, loneliness, anger,” notes Tom McClung. “And then there is this finale, At the End of the Day, which, in my view, just reminds us that we are human after all. It also belongs to the struggle: in the end, we must rest and accept things as they are, to better rise again and continue the fight.”
If the world keeps sinking, the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation remains faithful to its name. In the encroaching darkness, WU LYF’s return is a beacon of light.
A Wave That Will Never Break (Lyf Recordings). Release on April 10.
