Sky Musings

This stratospheric confessional finds an increasingly manic Ellie Rowsell singing about a panic attack at 40,000 feet, in which she's, "On top of the world, 23 years old and you're acting like it's over." The song, Roswell explained to NME, "Is about how people have deeper thoughts and more tears to shed on long-haul flights – apparently it's to do with being neither here nor there and your life being totally in the hands of someone else." So every time I'd go on a long flight and watch a romcom with a glass of wine, I'd find myself having one of these mini meltdowns," she added. "It's quite a dark song, but it must've been quite funny for anyone who actually saw me sobbing at Miss Congeniality."

Bassist Theo Ellis recalled the story of the song during a Consequence of Sound Track-by-Track interview: "'Sky Musings" was a demo that had been floating around for a while. It took a few different guises before ending up where it is now. We had played it in a completely live full band arrangement during preproduction but it felt wrong. We ended up in true Wolf Alice fashion going back to the demo's far more programmed arrangement; while sourcing the drum sound we were referencing Yeezus era drum sounds and Kraftwerk precision, we wanted the music to emulate the relentless nature of the encroaching panic that Ellie is describing. The track itself begins to open up from the concentrated claustrophobia as we added more Moog synths and mellotron sounds it being to grow into a mildly more organic sonic template. Joff's guitar airplane disintegration sound at the beginning was merely the cherry on top."