LOS ANGELES, CA- Radio Free Alice’s new single, “Rule 31,” arrives at the exact moment when the band’s momentum has become impossible to ignore. This year alone has launched them from rising curiosity to a genuine international force, a shift marked by a string of sold out shows across the UK, including a packed headline at London’s Scala last week, as well as festival appearances, growing press attention and a global fanbase that keeps multiplying. For anyone who has been following their ascent, “Rule 31” feels like a crystallization of everything people have been sensing about them.
The track began as a soundcheck riff, built around a bassline that immediately set the tone. The band later recorded it in Connecticut with producer Peter Katis while on tour earlier in the year. You can hear that wandering energy in the finished version. “Rule 31” feels like a song shaped on the move between hours of travel and the feedback loop of one crowded show after another. The whole thing has a raw, immediate current running through it.
Part of what makes the song so compelling is its mood. Radio Free Alice taps into a new wave and post punk palette that carries a distinctly nostalgic glow. As someone who grew up with artists from that lineage, the feeling is familiar even if the exact parallels are not quite identifiable. There are flashes of the bands who first introduced me to angular guitar work and cool toned vocals, flashes of records that spun during late nights when music felt like an instruction manual for the world. It is not that Radio Free Alice mimics any of those artists. It is that they summon the emotional temperature of that era, the mix of distance and intensity, the clean lines, the sense that a song can brood and dance at the same time.
Noah Learmonth’s vocal delivery deepens that mood. His laid back, almost laissez faire phrasing gives the song a weightless quality, as if he is circling the lyrics rather than pressing into them. Commands. Warnings. Tapping windows. Figures in gardens. A sense of spinning in place. It all tumbles together in a way that feels half dream, half diary page. The looseness works in their favor. It keeps the track open. It invites listeners to project their own meaning onto the imagery.
What is striking is how this nostalgic framework does not limit the band to an older audience. Instead it creates a bridge. Younger listeners who have discovered new wave and post punk through algorithmic wormholes can latch onto the energy immediately. Older listeners who lived through earlier waves of this sound can recognize the roots while appreciating how Radio Free Alice pushes the aesthetic forward. The band is operating in a sweet spot where the past and present collide without friction. It is easy to imagine their audience expanding in both directions.
Musically, the band seems to show how locked in they are with each other. Learmonth and Jules Paradiso build a guitar interplay that shifts between sharp edges and suspended atmosphere. Michael Phillips holds everything together with a bass tone that feels both melodic and propulsive. Lochie Dowd’s drumming drives the track without overwhelming its space. They work with the chemistry of a group that has spent years woodshedding, touring, testing ideas onstage and learning exactly how much pressure each part can take before the whole thing snaps into place.
All of this arrives at a moment when Radio Free Alice seem to be jumping to larger stages and broader visibility. Their has already garnered critical acclaim, including significant radio rotation and a dramatic rise in fan engagement. The band’s late summer arrival in the UK ignited a run of six sold out London shows, followed by Reading and Leeds slots, a series of US dates that also sold out, three packed New York City performances, and a stop at Shaky Knees, not to mention a stop in Los Angeles, that I did know about and am miffed that I missed. They will join Geese for a sold out February run in Australia and have confirmed festival appearances at Tramlines and Truck for next summer.
“Rule 31” fits perfectly into this moment. It carries the electricity of a band that knows it is on the brink of a bigger leap. It carries the warmth of nostalgia without feeling recycled. It carries a mood that feels strangely universal, familiar to longtime fans of new wave textures and instantly magnetic to younger listeners discovering that sound for the first time.
I feel like Radio Free Alice are tapping into something rare. Their music feels rooted in history while pointing toward what comes next. “Rule 31” is both a continuation and an escalation… even an elevation… and it hints that the band is only beginning to show how wide their reach can be.
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