You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Wolf Alice is a four-piece band from North London. They've been nominated for a Grammy and England's Mercury Prize.

Their second album, Visions of a Life, was released in September 2017.

In this episode, Singer and Guitarist Ellie Rousal and drummer Joel Amy tell the story of how they made the song Don't Delete the Kisses.

Their album was produced by Justin Melville Johnson and coming up later, you'll hear some of his thoughts as well.

Don't delete the kisses went through a lot of versions. There was a home demo that Ellie made, another demo with the full band, plus studio versions that they recorded in LA with Justin.

There were a lot of ideas that were created, but then scrapped later.

In this episode, they trace the path through those ideas, as well as how the song was influenced by Father John Misty, PJ Harvey, and the film Francis Ha.

It's Wolf Alice on Song Exploder.

No, no, never be your own.

My name is Ellie. I sing and play guitar in Wolf Alice.

My name's Joel, and I play drums.

I think the first idea I had for this song was that I wanted something that had a rolling synth in it, something that was repetitive and didn't change and everything else changed around it.

I think it partly came from wanting me to go into a festival in Spain. We had watched Father John Misty. He had one song which the synth was really prominent, and that was...

True affection.

True affection.

It was me, Theo, and Ellie watching in the crowd, and it's the whole package for that song, I think.

His performance that day, the setting, the way his band looked, looked very unbelievably cool, making this very powerful, beautiful song.

And I love the synth level left, and everything else changed around it.

When can we talk with the pace?

Stead up using all this strange devices?

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