Wolf Alice | Royal Albert Hall, London | 29 March 2026

Rating: 10/10

Teenage Cancer Trust, Royal Albert Hall — 29 March 2026

There are gigs, and then there are events. Sunday night at the Royal Albert Hall was unambiguously the latter — the kind of evening that lodges somewhere between your ribcage and your memory and refuses to budge. Wolf Alice closing out the 2026 Teenage Cancer Trust series, handpicked by Robert Smith himself, in one of the most storied rooms in the world? The weight of that alone would have been enough. But weight, it turns out, was only the beginning.

Smith’s curation of this year’s TCT run — elbow, Mogwai, Manic Street Preachers, My Bloody Valentine, Garbage, and Wolf Alice across six consecutive nights — has been widely described as the most uncompromisingly alternative lineup the series has ever seen. A no-skips week, if you will. And Wolf Alice, given the Sunday slot, the closing night, were clearly aware of what was being asked of them. As Ellie Rowsell told the crowd early on: “I want to have the best Sunday night ever, and I want you to as well.” She wasn’t performing a sentiment. She meant it.

But before any of that — before a single chord — there was Verity.

A young woman diagnosed with an incurable condition took the stage during the Teenage Cancer Trust’s pre-show segment, and in the space of a few minutes, she reframed the entire evening. Turning 26 on the 26th of 2026, a milestone she had once been told was impossible — given two weeks to live due to liver failure, then revised to eight months — she asked the entire Royal Albert Hall to sing her happy birthday, and they did, with thousands of phone torches lighting the room like a slow sunrise. By the time Wolf Alice walked on, there was barely a dry eye in the house, including, it seemed, on the stage itself.

What do you do with that? How do you play into a room already cracked open by something that beautiful and that devastating? Ellie Rowsell, Joff Oddie, Theo Ellis and Joel Amey’s answer was: you start with something rare.

Instead of the rousing ‘Thorns’, their customary curtain-raiser, they opened with ‘Heavenward’ — shoegazey, slow-burning, luminous — making its first appearance in a Wolf Alice setlist since 2020. The choice felt like a deliberate recalibration. This wasn’t the version of the band that arrives to a crowd already buzzing and surfs the energy. This was the version that earns it, that asks you to lean in rather than be swept along. The delicacy of those opening moments, Rowsell’s voice barely above a murmur before the guitars swelled, set a tone the rest of the night never abandoned: tender, present, enormous.

“I want to have the best Sunday night ever, and I want you to as well.”

‘White Horses’ arrived early and hit like a wave, followed by the aching ‘Just Two Girls’ and then ‘How Can I Make It OK?’, the latter taking on a particular resonance given everything the room had already been through. The Royal Albert Hall — a room that can occasionally feel like playing inside a ceremonial object — was by now fully alive, the acoustics doing something genuinely generous to the band’s dynamics, the loud bits landing with a physical thud and the quiet bits holding with almost uncomfortable intimacy.

Mid-set, there was a moment no one in the building will be talking about in clinical terms. ‘The Kesh Jig / Give Us a Drink of Water / The Flower of the Flock / Famous Ballymote’ — that gorgeous, unlikely stretch of traditional folk that the band have been weaving into recent sets — turned the room briefly into something closer to a communal ritual than a rock gig. It shouldn’t work. It works completely.

‘Bros’, when it came, was exactly what ‘Bros’ always is: one of the best songs written in the last decade, doing its quiet devastation in plain sight. ‘Don’t Delete the Kisses’ extended that feeling further, Rowsell inhabiting the track’s looping vulnerability with the kind of performance that makes you feel like you’re reading someone’s diary and they’ve specifically left it out for you. And then — because this band understand structure in a way that few of their contemporaries do — they closed the main set with ‘The Last Man on Earth’, a song that stretches and strains before collapsing into exactly the kind of release the evening demanded.

The encore was ‘Hammond Song’, the Roches cover that Wolf Alice have made their own, and it was, frankly, borderline transcendent. Rowsell alone with her voice, the hall holding its breath, the week drawing to a close. You could feel the end of something — not in a mournful way, but in the way that good things ending prove they were real.

This was only the second time we’d seen Wolf Alice since The Clearing — a record that already felt like a band at their peak — and what’s remarkable is that they’ve found a way to make the album even bigger in a room. Not louder. Bigger. There’s a generosity to how they play live now, a confidence that doesn’t harden into arrogance. They know who they are, they know why they’re here, and on Sunday night, they knew exactly what the moment needed.

Wolf Alice were not just the right band to close out Robert Smith’s most ambitious TCT curation. They were the only band.