Remi Wolf Emerges From The Trenches On Her New Album Mud

With a smile and a hopeful gaze peeking through her muddy face, Remi Wolf seems to embrace a career rebirth, with a more stripped-back sound that feels familiar to the California-born artist. Her new third studio album, Mud, steps away from the cartoonish, hyper-pop extravagance of earlier work like her debut Juno and Big Ideas and enters a post-Saturn return state of clarity and creative simplicity. 

Released via Island Records, Mud is, first and foremost, alive. Across eleven tracks, Remi Wolf makes her voice the record's driving force, alongside gut-spilling songwriting and earthy live instrumentation. With the first single, 'Twiggy,' Wolf makes it clear she has something to say, and she delivers it with a loud gasp and an exhilarating exhale in the track's bridge. 

Mud's footprint is all over Nashville, Big Bear, New York's Electric Lady Studios, and Joshua Tree. But it was Wolf's company of long-time collaborators and friends like Jack DeMeo, Jamie McLaughlin, and Gigi Grombacher that culminated in a "family band," as she describes it. Wolf sounds comfortable and charged, with nothing holding her back. 

The emphasis is on preferred spontaneity rather than forced perfection. Mud doesn't move in a dictated linearity; it is a free-flowing unload of Wolf's welcomed stream of consciousness, stumbling upon broken-hearted confessions and personal observations. The album's opener, the follow-up single, 'Bottle,' carries Wolf's signature melodious foundation, de-escalating the vulnerable take on her relationship with sobriety. 

Ranging from contemporary pop to country-rock-infused 'Burn Me Blue,' the album's caught-me-off-guard moment is 'I Won't Cry,' a power ballad, an instant tear-jerker, a shameless multi-layered plea born in the irrational trenches of a breakup, when pride and self-worth are put aside. 'Jamie' lands as a soft speak-to-sing confessional climaxing into Wolf's relentless soaring vocals. Each song reaffirms Remi Wolf's vocal range and her ability to carry emotion while testing her limits. 

A surprising one, but John Mayer, as Mud's only feature, appears on 'Moon So High,' the most tender musical moment, but not adding anything significant, only a momentary breather. With the background chanting and opening banjo notes, 'Wine Drunk' is here for the good time, before 'Guess,' when it all cracks. Remi Wolf scrapes off all the weighing-down sludge and sees clearly. 

Mud is Remi Wolf's most mature record yet. With a clear destination of becoming, the artist is human, messy, playful, and most of all alive in the midst of surviving one's endless twenties. The overall instrumental production brings Mud into a place of warm reckoning, where Remi Wolf can prove herself without unnecessary lavishness and technicolor. 

And to answer the always mind-bending question, is it better to speak or to die, Remi Wolf says - to sing.