An Evening of Mud with Remi Wolf

If Remi Wolf’s first two albums, 2021’s Juno and 2024’s Big Ideas, were in technicolor, her third LP Mud (out October 9 via Island Records) is more neutral, earthy and grounded. It’s still colorful, as Wolf tends to be, but the newly 30-year-old singer has been on a journey of rooting herself more firmly in the ground. “I feel like I've crossed into a new phase of life because of this album,” she says, sitting in the same basement studio at Electric Lady where most of the album was recorded. “I literally felt like I was covered in shit. And now, at the end of the album process, I feel so clean and clear. It has been a very cleansing record to make for me.” The rawness is delivered in the sound: stripped away of synths and programmed drums, Mud is Remi Wolf at her most lyrically and sonically vulnerable. The songs evoke the feeling of singing around a campfire with just your friends and a couple guitars because that’s how it felt for Wolf to make it. But to find the clearing in the forest, she needed to make a whole new trail first. By the end of 2024, Wolf had been touring for about four years straight. Between opening stints on Halsey, Paramore and Olivia Rodrigo’s arena tours, she started headlining bigger rooms on her own in between. She started thinking about her next album as soon as she wrapped up the first leg of her Big Ideas tour that October, moving with the same urgency and transience she had grown accustomed to over the last several years of her life. But as the touring wound down, Wolf's life had begun to spiral out of control. “This is a breakup record and a Saturn return record,” she explains. “When I started writing the album, I was so emotionally all over the place and in a really unbalanced, bad relationship at the time. I was drinking, I was going through ups and downs on the road, and just got bogged down by a lot of feelings and exhaustion from my twenties.” By March of 2025, her relationship of two and half years had abruptly ended, with…