Remi Wolf Has Big Ideas

Occasionally, when Remi Wolf talks about her new album, Big Ideas, she lulls herself into autopilot, her body operating with no input from her brain. During a recent meeting, as she discusses studio logistics in her syrupy alto (“We worked at Electric Lady in New York, we worked at Conway in LA…”), she reaches across the table and snags a french fry off my plate.

“Do you want any ketchup?” I ask her.

Immediately, the spell is broken, leaving Wolf in a state of pure shock. She shrieks with laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m just, like, talking and eating your fries!” she says. “I was just…mind empty.”

There is a funny dissonance between 28-year-old Wolf’s cherubic face—with a halo of dark curls to match—and her tendency to pepper her sentences with “fucking” and “dude.” (She also has a wonderfully eclectic sense of style: for our lunch, she wears a long-sleeve tie-dyed shirt, a pearl choker with a large silver pendant, and mini platform Uggs.) It’s eminently likable: Striding into the Hollywood diner where we sat down together, she’s greeted with a wide grin and a warm “Welcome back!” from our waitress. Wolf has turned this unassuming restaurant into her office recently, taking meetings with various label executives ahead of her album’s release on July 12. “I wish she was here for this interview,” she says of one waitress who, unprompted, told Wolf—and a table full of execs—about her handmade “Lorena Bobbitt Rules!” T-shirt. “She was like, ‘Do you guys want more coffee? Also, I made this shirt. She chopped off her boyfriend’s penis.’ And we were just like, ‘Cool.’”

Big Ideas continues Wolf’s strong track record of clear-as-a-bell vocals, funky production, and vibrant lyricism. While her first LP, Juno, was produced entirely in a bedroom at the height of the COVID pademic, Wolf jumped at the chance to record Big Ideas in hallowed studios like Electric Lady, whose rich history she hoped would bleed into the music. On the new album, she paints vivid scenes of coughing up frogs and spending a loved-up Halloween in Chicago over zany guitar riffs and synths. Also present are pronounced jazz and disco influences, dialed up to match the album’s energetic spirit.

One recurring theme in Wolf’s music is her fluid sexuality. Since her first EP, You’re a Dog! (2019), she has referred to both men and women as the subjects of her desire (and, often, frustration). “When I first entered the music industry, it was a fight to be seen,” she says. In the early years of her career, she admits that she was reluctant to be branded as an LGBTQ+ artist. “I’m just trying to be myself. I’m writing a lot about my literal life experiences,” she says. She worried that a label would not only push her into a box but force her to speak for more than just herself. “I have no authority on anything, really—on gender politics, on queer politics. I don’t have anything to say other than you do you, and I’m gonna do me.” In the five years since You’re a Dog!, however, she feels that attitudes toward sexuality—and queerness in particular—have shifted “to a place where it’s like, who gives a fuck?” she says. “We don’t have to make it a big deal—which I love.”

Indeed, life looks immeasurably different to her now, at 28, than it did even three years ago, when she released Juno. “The 20s are really fucking hard, dude. But now I’m in my Saturn return,” she says, referring to an astrological phenomenon known to trigger significant—and often difficult—growth toward the end of that decade. “I actually think it’s good. I’ve heard that 28 is a good year, so I’m trying to enjoy it.”

Balance is another big theme, both in her music and her personal life. Wolf has been open about her struggles with sobriety, which she covered extensively on Juno, particularly in the song “Liquor Store.” “To be candid, I have not been totally sober since [rehab],” she says. “I’ve dabbled with drinking or dabbled with being sober for a lot of months at a time, and I’m still figuring out what works for me.” She describes feeling confined by the all-or-nothing nature of the 12-step program: “There’s this feeling that there’s one way to be sober, one way to be healthy,” she says. “I want to explore everything and not feel like it’s complete sobriety or bust. Right now I feel great, but I’m not sober.”

She has complicated feelings about how she dealt with her addiction in the past. “Sobriety was a huge part of why Juno exists,” she says. But also, “I feel like I set myself up a little bit with that album, because I was so gung ho about sobriety. At the time, that really was what I needed in my life. But I’m on my own journey, and I’m not going to bend my truth to what people want to hear.”

Creating a routine has helped. “Honestly, super annoying, but exercise is important,” she says, wryly. “I’m cracking the code of having a little bit more balance in my life, which I think I’m inherently bad at. But I’m figuring that out. Slowly.”

Big Ideas speaks to all of that, as well as the anxiety and feelings of self-doubt that she’s had to confront. “For two years, I really had a hard time with the thought of being perceived, especially by people in real life,” she says. “It was really difficult for me to not feel like I was being watched or sought after in slimy ways.” In the music, she tried to break everything down. “I was grappling with all the big questions, all the big ideas: what I was doing with my life, what I was doing in my relationships, what I cared about. It was all rolling around in my head, and I was trying to figure it all out. I think that you can hear that in the songs,” she says. “It was two years of synthesizing, being like, What input do I value? What do I not? Am I going to trust myself, or am I going to completely ignore myself?”

If one lesson has emerged from Wolf’s past few years of self-discovery, it’s the importance of knowing herself. “I’m trusting my gut as much as possible. Because that’s when you get in trouble, when you are ignoring it,” she says. “Every bad thing in my life that’s ever happened has been because I’ve ignored my own intuition. I really do think that.”

Maybe it’s the Saturn return—or maybe it’s the sheer volume of work she’s poured into herself—but Wolf has, it appears, finally cracked the code. “I’m more confident in myself now. Before, I was so anxious and I felt like such a fish out of water in the industry. I didn’t know how to navigate it and felt it collapsing onto me,” she says. “Now I’m able to float above it a little bit more. Now I’m really getting to this point where I’m doing a lot of this shit for myself, to make myself happy.”