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The Night Safari EP

Electronic / Rock

April 19, 2023

Patrick Wolf ’s resounding baritone easily conjures up gravitas, lending his best songs a combined air of theatricality and raw emotion. The English musician’s first two records were tightly wound, explosive with pent-up angst, and beguiling in their ornate instrumentation, poetic lyrics, and damaged electronics; when Wolf trended toward a more mainstream sound—as on his last album of new material, 2011’s disco-spangled, lovesick  Lupercalia —he traded the strange charms of his early work for the ill-fitting patina of generic radio pop. Management and A&R troubles made things even more complicated for the London singer-songwriter. (“If I think about  Lupercalia now,” he  said recently, “it’s like hands around my neck.”) Wolf’s 2012  acoustic album of reworked songs became a way of cleaning the slate that also, as the years went on, looked more and more like a career sendoff.

Wolf’s first new music in over a decade, then, has baggage to unpack.  The Night Safari EP was crafted out of an intense period of personal upheaval, including bankruptcy, a struggle with addiction, and the passing of his mother. Wolf understandably turns inward, purging bouts of anxiety and depression through diffuse, melancholy electro-folk. It’s a welcome return to his earlier sound, embellished throughout with electronic wrinkles and the deep, rich tones of his viola. Early standout “Nowhere Game” clips by with clattering percussion and pitch-shifted vocal rhythms, capturing the cyclical nature of addiction in references to “the danger that keeps you alive”: “Dying to be living proof/Of something survived in your youth,” he sings mournfully over the chugging beat, adding to its acute sense of hopelessness.

The title track further recalls the sullen music of his early breakthroughs. Here, Wolf creates a gentle build of plucked Celtic harp over an eddying piano melody for a disquieting look at those late-night moments in bed when your mind chews over every anxious thought imaginable. “Don’t you lose sleep/Pay no mind to me unraveling,” he pleads as the song loosens into a digitized, cut-up rhythm. It’s a more successful approach to playing with familiar sounds than “Archeron,” which uses a 7/8 time signature to evoke a fractured headspace; Wolf delivers a cryptic, chanted monologue inspired by novelist  Robert Graves amid ominous organs and strings, jerking back and forth between quiet and bombast. It’s effective in its jarring delivery, but feels stiff and out of step with the rest of the EP’s carefully arranged tableaux.

Still, Wolf’s ear for melody and imagistic lyrics remain strong, knifelike features of his music. Although  The Night Safari ’s sweeping dramas can be dour, Wolf’s voice, sonorous and commanding, is only growing finer with age. On “Dodona,” with its gorgeously cinematic viola solo and sorrowful piano, Wolf is at his most moving, stretching his voice from a low growl to a scratchy, throaty high. “His tongue is rattling,” Wolf sings of his protagonist, a “whipping boy” overwhelmed by trauma: “But broken bells don’t make a sound/No matter how hard you hit ’em.” Like the rest of  The Night Safari ’s most enthralling songs, it gives way to a well-earned, bruising form of catharsis.

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Patrick Wolf

The Night Safari

After several years absence, Patrick Wolf returns as singular a pop star as he's ever been, finds Luke Turner

This past Tuesday night, Patrick Wolf finished his first UK tour in years with a night at the Village Underground in London in a joyous, confident performance, at times a lot heavier and rattling than anyone familiar with his Sundark And Riverlight , his 2012 compilation of folk reworkings of his back catalogue, might have expected. Best of all was how the material from first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind In The Wires sat alongside new EP The Night Safari in their distinct sonic inventiveness – ‘The City’, ‘The Magic Position’ and ‘Accident & Emergency’ from the era of his more concerted attempts to assault the mainstream paled in comparison.

As Patrick Wolf told me in this Guardian interview, the past decade of relative silence was a personal hell, involving familial grief, bankruptcy and a battle with alcohol and drug dependency. These years of musical exile shaped the five tracks of The Night Safari EP, alongside a return to DIY self-dependency and, crucially, some of the instrumentation that made his early music so good. It veers between the gloriously dramatic ‘Dodona’, Michael Nyman via Warp records cracked electronics in ‘Acheron’, a shuffling modernist crooner in ‘Nowhere Game’ and to finish off, ‘Enter The Day’, all rolling piano and optimism.

At the Village Underground, Patrick Wolf prowled the stage in his rather fabulous self-made clothes and was by turns honest, witty, bleakly funny (“you’re all going to die… sorry, I am told I am too mean to my audience”) and filthy (‘Tristan’ introduced with an ad lib apparently about fisting), and best of all sung in the finest voice of his life. I used to always think that it would only be in another world less tainted by commerce, algorithms and laziness that Patrick Wolf could be a pop star, but I realise I was wrong. He now seems perfectly happy to do pop star as he wants to be, and for that world to be his very own.

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Patrick Wolf – The Night Safari Review

What does Patrick Wolf sound like?

Dark folk blended into electronic and industrial symphonies.

The review Patrick Wolf – The Night Safari

It has been over a decade since Patrick Wolf last released music and during that time Patrick faced bankruptcy, addiction and the passing of his mother. Having said he felt he’d lost touch with his music, ‘The Night Safari’ sounds and feels like a return to Patrick Wolf’s roots. It’s a mixture of frenzied electronica and Celtic and Asian folk influences. Whilst there are flashes of symphonic moments here, the album eschews the bombastic bomb of Wolf’s later work.

Possibly the most bombastic and symphonic track is the opening title piece. Starting out with lush harp and piano motifs guiding Patrick’s strong vocals forward, it erupts for the final two minutes into something more akin to early 2000s Lamb. Driving beats, viola layers and ringing bells signal something of a rebirth as the song bounds into life. ‘The Night Safari’ is a five track EP that effortlessly flows from one song to the next like a single narrative. ‘Nowhere Game’ drives dark and evokes the same industrial murkiness of Wolf’s first two albums. Celtic strings provide the air to the deep bass and warped vocal chants. It is an instant classic in Wolf’s repertoire.

As if to signal a total 180 into his more experimental side, ‘Acheron’ is a disruptive colour bomb of 7/8 piano rolls, spoken word snippets, long drawn chants and exotic string moments. The drums spin around your ears and the whole track feels like its purpose is to catch you out. It reminds me a little of Imogen Heap’s iMegaphone b-sides but with a more exotic spin. It certainly stands out from the other tracks. ‘Dodona’ moves us from chaos to mourning as viola, piano and voice create the space for grief. The way the EP is structured from pacey dark beats to fractured chaos to Dodona’s space and elegance – the moment feels earned. It also makes the closing piece ‘Enter the Day’ all the sweeter as they both stay on the more dreamy acoustic side of Patrick’s grizzled piano-pop style but ‘Enter the Day’ is far more hopeful. It is as if over the 27 minutes, we’ve got caught up in a mess, had a proper good cry about it and exhaled deeply. The chirpy skip of the final tracks piano motif is like you’ve got a bounce in your step again. I hope Patrick Wolf feels like he has too.

‘The Night Safari’ is a superb return to music for Patrick Wolf. It feels cohesive and tells its own story. Fans who have waited for new work will not be disappointed one jot – sonically it’s as if he just stepped away for a few minutes. What is also great is that ‘The Night Safari’ would also work as a fantastic starting point for new fans too. It touches on the vast majority of his styles without feeling like it is covering old ground. It’s great to have one of Britain’s finest songwriters back creating comfortably again.

Recommended track: Nowhere Game

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Review: Patrick Wolf's Latest - The Night Safari

Patrick Wolf, the 39-year-old English singer-songwriter, has been making waves in the music business for 20 years! His style is unique, and his eclectic history in music and fashion during his stay in the limelight has meant that he has gathered a wide range of followers from around the globe.

"The Night Safari" is a deep song with lyrics that take you on a real journey of discovery. The concept of being on a night safari is everything you think it might be, with dreamy phrases and hypothetical scenarios that keep you engaged with the lyrics throughout the song.

At over six minutes and with a distinctly unique feel to it, Patrick Wolf has delivered an operatic masterpiece with "The Night Safari". With little modern comparison, we are musically taken on quite a journey. With a floating vocal being the main staple of the song, the rest is divided up into a variety of sections with different vibes flowing across each one. We start with a very soft, stripped-back verse, but by the end, there are loops and a variety of instrumentation that make this song a fascinating listen that has been a wonderful experience.

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Patrick Wolf Announces Comeback EP The Night Safari and Shares “Enter the Day”: Stream

Wolf's first new song since 2012's Sundark and Riverlight

English songwriter  Patrick Wolf has announced his comeback EP  The Night Safari  with lead single, “Enter the Day,” his first new release in over a decade.

We last heard from Wolf with 2012’s  Sundark and Riverlight ,  a double-album acoustic reimagining of his catalog. “Enter the Day” arrives exactly 20 years after his debut,  The Patrick Wolf EP.  The song opens with searching pianos and the words, “There is no easy way to begin/ Telling the story of the year of your drowning.”

In a statement, Wolf said that when he wrote the song he’d been thinking about his mother, who died of cancer in 2018. “A charcoal drawing of a sparrow hawk was the last work my mother was making before she died and when I took my first walk to explore the land around my new home back when I moved to live by the sea, a sparrow hawk was soaring over me in silence at the mouth of the bay,” he wrote. “That afternoon I went home to my upright piano and began writing this song, which ended up becoming an epilogue to the narrative of The Night Safari EP. As producer I crafted this song as a bridge out of the plaintive production of Sundark and Riverlight to where the new EP will safari the listener to.”

Check out “Enter the Day” below.  The Night Safari  is expected in 2023.

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Patrick Wolf: ‘I saw music as a traumatic space to be in’

After a decade-long silence and a traumatic growth period, the south london songwriter is ready to start afresh with his new ep, the night safari.

Silence has been Patrick Wolf’s default for the best part of a decade. 

Having shared six studio albums by the age of 29 and collaborated with artists including Marianne Faithfull, Angelo Badalementi and Nan Goldin, the prolific singer-songwriter and producer stepped back from music in 2012, following the release of double-disc retrospective Sundark and Riverlight. “I’d put a lot of music into the world, but I don’t think I’d had a normal growth pattern,” Wolf reflects today, speaking from his home on the east Kent coast. “I almost had to catch up with my emotional and spiritual development.” 

The ensuing years brought little peace. Fighting alcohol and drug addiction, reeling from his mother’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent death, and betrayed and bankrupted by a management team who’d neglected to file a single tax return in eight years, Wolf simply had no stomach for the vocation he’d pursued doggedly since his mid-teens.

“With all the toxicity that I was wound up in, I saw music as a traumatic space to be in,” he sighs. “And once you stop, things that have always been held together so tightly by adrenaline and ambition start to fall apart spectacularly.”

Wolf tackles these wilderness years head-on on his much-anticipated comeback collection The Night Safari . Over ambient organ chords and staccato Celtic harp, the five-track EP begins with the words, “ Pardon me for disturbing your dreaming / Did not want you to hear me crying / Or watch me reeling and receding / Into this old mania of mine .”

“Many of my album titles – like Wind in the Wires, The Magic Position – have been phrases I’ve used to describe a mental process or an affliction,” Wolf explains. “ The Night Safari describes these nights lying by the side of my partner and detaching mentally as I looked at the last two years’ – and the next two years’ – failures and anxieties. And the realisation you’re going to have to navigate your way through that to reach the morning.”

The EP charts that spiritual journey, from the quiet terror of the title track and the emotional instability of Acheron – named after one of the five rivers of Hades in ancient Greek mythology – to a place of healing on Dodona and Enter The Day . On the latter, Wolf entreats the listener to “ Enter the day / When out of the shadow of doubt ,” over undulating piano. It’s a cautious plea for resilience, rather than an expression of blind optimism.

Though clean and sober for “multiple years”, Wolf still has complicated feelings about sharing the specifics of his story. “I'm still trying to work out what my public relationship is with [my recovery],” he says thoughtfully. “I see some people that enter the public eye with their recovery, and it’s almost like they’re trying to sell people something. And that’s not the way that I want to go forward… I don’t want to be too guarded or defensive, but there’s still something very precious about being private.”

Amidst the tumult of the last 10 years, there were attempts to create. In 2015, he took a pilgrimage to Acheron and the oracle at Dodona in northwest Greece – a detox trip disguised as a sort of writing retreat. “I had some kind of Byronic idea that the grand journey was going to change my perspective on life,” he says wryly. “I thought I would enter a real state of prolific and insightful work, but from then onwards I stopped writing.”

He rallied three years later, making arrangements to record an album at the New York studio of Tony Shanahan, whom he met while playing harp and viola in Patti Smith’s band. Shortly before he was due to fly, his mother was given a week to live, and the record was later scrapped.

‘Once you stop, things that have always been held together so tightly by adrenaline and ambition start to fall apart spectacularly’ – Patrick Wolf

In 2020, he played a sell-out residency at St Pancras Old Church but found himself beset by illness. “I really felt like I had not returned to work mentally prepared at all,” he confesses. “For me, those shows felt extremely dark and gothic. So it really wasn’t until I worked very hard at building a solid foundation of sobriety and balanced it with this quiet life here by the sea, that I was able to start again [with music].”

The seeds for Wolf’s recovery were sown while still living in Bloomsbury. Undertaking a bi-weekly course of psychotherapy to tackle his addiction and apathy towards music, he found further solace visiting exhibitions at the Bedlam psychiatric hospital in south London. He began collecting ceramics created by current inpatients, and discovered “new superheroes” in the shape of former inhabitants, the artists Richard Dadd and Louis Wain. “To see people in a place where they were healing and the things that they were making was really encouraging to me.”

After lockdown ended, Wolf swapped London for Kent and embraced a slower pace of life with his partner and his two cats, Percival and Hieronymus. “When I bought this house, I really saw that as the beginning of a chapter,” he says. “I was able to close a 10-year period.”

The idea of starting again “from scratch” is borne out by The Night Safari, which sees Wolf self-producing and playing every instrument – from the bowed psaltery to the suitcase organ – just as he did on his debut album Lycanthropy , almost exactly two decades ago. Every bit as integral to his creative rebirth was his decision to reclaim his primary instrument. 

“My first love was the viola. But from Lycanthropy onwards, the more that ‘popstar’ tag was thrown at me, the further away that instrument got. The quest for fame is really a quest for validation and acceptance, and I realised that could be sought holistically elsewhere. So to put a viola solo in the middle of Dodona was a spiritual statement; a reclamation.”

Wolf views The Night Safari very much as the opening chapter of the second stage of his career. And with his seventh album already close to completion, it does feel like his most fruitful years are still ahead of him. Certainly, as the once boy-wonder prepares to move into his fourth decade, he seems more at ease in his skin than ever. 

“I haven't quite worked out how my age will define me,” he smiles. “But I have always looked up to artists that start young and continue to grow. I’m excited about going into my forties because this is when it starts getting good in other people’s catalogues.”

The Night Safari is out now .

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Patrick Wolf Penetrates New World with ‘The Night Safari’

Tina Benitez-Eves

Updated: 

The Night Safari is a phrase Patrick Wolf conceptualized around nights spent “staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep and descending into a wilderness of dead ends and anxieties.” 

Videos by American Songwriter

The title of the British singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist’s latest EP, The Night Safari, chronicles Wolf’s nearly decade-long creative lull and reemergence from addiction, hopelessness, and grief.

Written, performed and produced by Wolf, with additional production and engineering by Brendan Cox, The Night Safari is a collection of five songs. The tracks are backed by an ambitious arrangement of strings and other instruments — all played by Wolf — including violins, bowed psaltery, viola, and Celtic harp, along with an upright piano Moog synthesizer, and a Critter pocket piano, among other pieces.

The project was recorded in separate locations. From the coastal areas Isle of Thanet to Wandsworth in England to Lewisham and King’s Cross in London, and the Blue Mountains, the EP was mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios. The Night Safari is a fitting score moving the crossing through five distinct, and connected, stories.

Opening on the six-plus minute opus, “The Night Safari” is a song of “departure” and picks up where Wolf’s 2011 album Lupercalia left off. “Where the lovers were poised to elope on a bright future together,” he says, pinpointing the prior egress.

“This opening song says after all our seemingly invincible hope of love, that ‘all the love, is not enough,’” shares Wolf. “Although I write so that people can reflect and attach their own context to the lyrics, my intention with this song was to mark a departure from the coexisting togetherness of ‘Lupercalia.’ It says to the other half, in spirit: ‘The problems I am facing I will have to face alone. You or your love isn’t what will save me anymore. Now I need to find out what I have to rescue myself from and If I do and work through it, I may return safe at your side.’”

Continuing on, The Night Safari ventures into the no man’s land pulsing stomp of “ Nowhere Game ,” a song that came to Wolf first in melody several years earlier while he watched a storm brewing on a beach in Crimea. Over time, “Nowhere Game” evolved into a narrative around Wolf’s addiction, and a period of hopelessness. The song is told partly from the perspective of his sister and all those who tried to initially reach out to him.

“If you won’t accept our help, go ahead and continue to self-destruct,” says Wolf, elaborating on the meaning of the song and its un-celebratory refrain of Happy birthday / To the never get out of this now. “I hope you hit your rock bottom soon,” he continues. “Only then will you want to start to escape the nowhere of your life. Until then, happy birthday, another year in nowhere.”

Cutting through, The Night Safari is centered by a mid-Eastern, electric instrumental, “Acheron.” This halfway mark on The Night Safari is composed in multiple time signatures and with varied instruments before segueing into the seven-plus minute atmospheric dwelling of “Dodona,” a track chronicling more of Wolf’s 10-year journey toward sobriety.

“I booked a one-way to ticket landing on the Isle of Crete to catch a boat to the Epirus region of Greece,” recalls Wolf. “As my plane touched down, in enforced detoxification, my pilgrimage to the oracle of Dodona began, believing naively I would be able to rid myself of my affliction by this journey.”

He adds, “The journey to Dodona was the prelude to the chapter of life where I begin working to get better and also the realization that what lay ahead of me was a rock bottom, that there was to be much healing and recovery before I could ever think about returning to work or writing again.”

The Night Safari ends by reopening on the lightened “Enter the Day,” a letter to himself about renewal. Trembling at the helm / At standstill and overwhelm / Oh dear, nearly departed / Now life is a bridge / You cannot cross or burn, sings Wolf on the more lifted close.

Wolf has collaborated with Patti Smith , Marianne Faithfull, Tilda Swinton, and late composer Angelo Badalamenti , among other artists. For Wolf, The Night Safari is a reflection of the decade-plus passage of time since his fifth album Lupercalia in 2011 and follow-up Sundark and Riverlight — a reimagined compilation of his songs. It also serves as a precursor to Wolf’s forthcoming full-length album, set for release in early 2024.

Accompanying The Night Safari , Wolf recently released a monochromatic short film, The Bowline Knot , tying the visuals filmed around tracks “The Night Safari” and “Nowhere Game.”

Wolf spoke to American Songwriter about the years of work that led to The Night Safari , his journey to sobriety, and returning to writing, and a brand new life.

American Songwriter: You’ve presented these five distinct, and grand, tracks that formed The Night Safari. Describe the aftermath of releasing such an intense body of work.

Patrick Wolf: It’s definitely meant to be a dream sequence. It’s such a long period of work that stems across a long period of time. If I were a dentist, it would be like taking the plaque or the tartar off my teeth. It’s given me that feeling of being handed over. I’m feeling light about it all. It’s cleared an emotional residue for me. For a while, I was wading through that period of not being able to write, and it got a bit dark.

AS: These songs are ones that began taking shape years earlier. Were they transforming even more as you started to record everything?

PW: I left space for that. Sometimes, I am not writing the lyrics until I’ve gotten the final production, and it’s just a series of vowels and consonants up until then. When my mother passed in 2018, so much else was happening up to that point in my life that I was not going to be able to write about it right then. Then the years went by, and I was naturally digesting my grief and letting it speak. I was finding ways to describe it and write about it.

AS: The EP follows your journey to sobriety. When did you first begin turning your life around?

PW: My rock bottom was really 2015 to 2016, and after that, it was really a period of complete disconnection — from my work, from my responsibility as Patrick Wolf, touring, and being in the public eye. It was everything from bankruptcy to the beginning of my mother becoming ill. I was always trying to get work finished, and it was so forced because everything else was falling apart. The only thing that would come out of me creatively was pessimism and nihilism.

AS: Thinking back to your debut, Lycanthropy  (2003), and now with The Night Safari, do you feel like you’re the same songwriter?

PW: The first chapter of my career began with an EP and an album. Both of those were either rewriting or recording songs that I’ve written from the age of 13 up to the age of 20, so there was this decade of those EPS, of taking the past and rephrasing it for the present. That’s pretty much what’s happening here. I’m starting with an EP and catching up on that decade, so there are a lot of similarities here. 

AS: What can you share about the forthcoming album?

PW: Two years ago, I left London. I live on what they call the Viking Coast, and that experience of putting everything into a van and crossing over with all my instruments and everything. It was the beginning of a chapter of life that, in a way, The Night Safari serves as a prelude to.

I walked and learned the coastline and started going to local book shops and learning about the area’s folklore and mythology and really building up my language of the soil, and the cliffs, and the legends here. What I want to do is take the forgotten mythology and folklore of this town, and this landscape, which is incredibly beautiful, and set them as some of the markers of the stories I’m going to be telling.

AS: Would you say The Night Safari was healing for you? PW: It was. I don’t regret anything about the last 10 years. I always promised myself I wouldn’t return to work until I had a sense of gravity. I didn’t really know what that meant. Recently, I was planting strawberries, blackberries, and rhubarb. And that was the same day that my song got [on the charts] here, and I thought “Oh, that’s nice,” and I went and planted the strawberry plants.

This is the gratitude that I wanted, and the life that I wanted. The garden needs me. My cats need me. I have a purpose here. I have a life, and at the end of the day, it’s about finding that balance. In the old days, it would be three bottles of gin later and one week later of celebrating being on the list, but I am not a victim of the tide of success and failure in my career anymore. The joy is just making it, and the other joy is being able to experience it as it happens.

Photos: Kim Jakobsen-To / Courtesy of Erika Tooker PR

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• Album & EP Reviews

Patrick Wolf – The Night Safari EP

• By Josh Williams

Label: Apport Released:  14th April 2023

Patrick Wolf is a name nearly forgotten to the mists of time by the virtue that it’s been over 10 years since his last album. But, he is finally ready to return from his self-imposed exile with his new EP ‘The Night Safari’, the first part of his story of his time away.

Musically, it takes the hallmarks of Patrick’s writing with his lovely vocals (such as on the title-track) while also updating the others, like with ‘Nowhere Game’ with its frantic drums reminiscent of the blood beat indie scene Wolf arose from. 

There are some moments of madness where Wolf struggles to avoid straying into full self-indulgence, but he just about manages it such as on the 7 and half minute ‘Dodona’.

It is, however, a welcome return from Mr Wolf leaving the world ready for more.

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Sad Night Dynamite believe in a fantasy with ‘Mrs Dior’, from debut album ‘Welcome The Night’

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The Night Safari - Single

April 11, 2023 3 Songs, 15 minutes ℗ 2023 Apport

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THE NIGHT SAFARI EP | VINYL

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The Night Safari EP on 12" Vinyl. All lyrics and credits handwritten by Patrick Wolf on a printed inner sleeve, alongside photography by Kim Jakobsen-To and drawings by Patrick. This run of the EP will be a limited print of 1000 "Black River" coloured vinyl copies, the first 250 of which will be hand numbered and signed by Patrick.

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