Songfacts®:

• This was the product of the four Mumford & Sons band members jamming in the studio. "Quite a fun song to play, a really collaborative effort," bassist Ted Dwayne told The Music.com.
• Both Ted Dwayne and guitarist Winston Marshall had major relationships collapse during the writing and recording of the Wilder Mind album. "2014 was a pretty bad year for me," Marshall told Billboard magazine. "Quite a lot of loss." He paused. "Playing stuff like 'The Wolf' is so f--king cathartic."
• The song's music video was directed by Marcus Haney, who once created his own documentary of sneaking into over 50 music festivals. Haney's team of cameras followed Mumford & Sons for 48 hours during their visit to the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Tennessee. Dressed as a chicken, fox, Robin Hood and a blushing bride, the quartet went relatively unrecognized a as they run through the Bonnaroo grounds interacting with fans and enjoying the rides.
  
  The cameras continued to follow the group onto their tour bus as they ditched the costumes and prepared o headline the sold out festival.
  
  Look out for The Office's Ed Helms, who makes a brief appearance in the clip.
• This was an important song in indentifying the sound that Mumford & Sons wanted for Wilder Mind. Ted Dwane told NME: "There's a point with every record we've made that the album starts to assert its identity and I think that's kind of what happened with 'The Wolf'."
  
  "We recognized that this is going to be a rockier album," he added, "this is what's exciting us, this is the sort of music we want to be making."
• When frontman Marcus Mumford played the song to a friend at six o'clock in the morning, he received some honest criticism in return. "He was like 'It's not good enough, you've got to have a bridge. Write a bridge,'" Mumford said. "So we wrote a bridge and it actually made the song better, that's what friends are for isn't it?"