Mrs. Smith," aka Laurel Smith, Emerging from the shadows, is the red-hot hip-shaking new single "Wolf," a vampirical glam punk-rock smasher with a dark cinematic whiff. Shrouded with her familiar mystique, Smith welcomes casual you to a nighttime landscape that's raw yet inarguably infectious, palatable in its nocturnal yearning and driving production, influenced on occasion by snippets of her music history alongside the grit of contemporary nu-metal.
A visual and sonic statement, "Wolf," unfolds in real-time in a spellbinding visualizer imagined by Smith herself with director Matilda Harding Kemp. The end product is a gorgeous, noir-ish piece that ratchets up "Wolf's" primal menace, oozing with the same aesthetics as its sound.
Looking back on the inspiration behind "Wolf," Smith explains how her childhood soundtrack of rock and indie greats AC/DC, Pink Floyd, U2, and the Police led her to a guiding star that has always been there, albeit subconsciously, her roots. "Making 'Wolf' was like a nod to where I began," she says. "I'd been listening to a lot of Bring Me The Horizon and Linkin Park on the bus to my sessions, and that put me in the mood for the day." The result is a song that pounds with the anthemic heft of classic rock, its chorus ballasted by the razor-sharp edge of modern alternative production.
With "Wolf," Laurel Smith carves out more space in the ever-changing, ever-shifting soundscape, again showing us that she is an artist unafraid of embracing the darkness and the light. Haunting yet anthemic, intimate yet ferocious, that is Smith at her most feral.