On her second album ‘Big Ideas’, Remi Wolf dives head-first into a whirlwind of emotions and experiences, crafting a genre-bending masterpiece that showcases just why she’s one of the very best pop stars ‘around’.

Words: Martyn Young.
Photos: Derek Bremner.

“It’s been an absolutely wild ride.” Remi Wolf has been busy, very busy, putting in the pop star hours as she notches up show after show and highlight after highlight, all the while continuing to establish herself as one of the most brilliantly colourful and creative minds in pop. “I’ve been doing this now for five years, which is crazy; that’s a significant portion of my life by this point,” she says almost breathlessly from a lovely leafy park in early summer Berlin, where she’s on tour supporting Olivia Rodrigo and sprinkling the seeds of her really very excellent second album ‘Big Ideas’.

Remi has crammed an awful lot into those five years, first emerging with her own brand of lo-fi idiosyncratic alt-pop jams in 2019 and her first EP, ‘You’re A Dog!’. What was immediately clear was that Remi was a gloriously exuberant and vibrant character. However, some of that playfulness masked all the hard work and sacrifice behind the quirkiness as Remi sought to navigate through the crowded and demanding pop space of the 2020s. “I feel like even after five years I’m still learning what I like, what I don’t like. I’m still learning how I operate best in every capacity when it comes to making music, touring, communicating with my team, having a social life and taking care of myself,” she reflects.

Taking care of herself is a major thing for Remi, especially considering some of her past issues with alcohol and pushing herself physically in her past life as an actual Olympic athlete, skiing at the Youth Olympic Games. Can you imagine how hard it might be to do skiing properly AND be a certified pop legend? Hats off to Remi. Anyway, now her self-care routine mainly involves yoga and food and very long walks, trying to enjoy the precious little time off she has. While the life of a pop star might seem like impossible fun and frolics, Remi repeatedly emphasises how hard work it is. “It’s an ever-rotating door of new joys and new problems constantly,” she says. “It’s one big problem-solving puzzle. That is life in general, but I’ve been such a busy person. How I would describe my career so far is ‘pretty busy’!” Busyness is wired into the very fibre of Remi’s being. She can’t be anything else, and all that is realised on the album she’s been cooking up for almost two years now.

‘Big Ideas’ is an instructive title for an artist full of ambition. It’s a statement: a declaration of a new way of working and a blossoming of all of the different facets of Remi’s diverse talents into a dynamic and frequently thrilling genre-expansive collection. “It all comes down to, especially on this album, really leaning into my strengths but then within my strengths letting myself experiment a lot,” she says enthusiastically of her creative vision. The album feels very intuitive; there’s an innate musicality and expressiveness to Remi’s artistry that gives her music a malleable, ever-evolving quality. “My favourite way to write is essentially just jam,” she laughs as she describes the impulsive way that she and her collaborators work. Very much no thoughts, just vibes. Except there are some actually quite deep thoughts, but expressed in a different way.

For this record, Remi took on something of a conductor or vibe-channeller-in-chief role as she set about harnessing a team of people working within just the right environment to capture those perfect lightning-in-a-bottle moments. “I let myself do a lot on this record, and I was catering the rooms and catering the people I was working with, the studios I was in, how they were set up, and the flow of the work. I was catering it to this jam-heavy experience,” she explains. “It was very collaborative in that way. Ever since I was little in bands, my favourite way to write music has been to improvise and really rock with my own intuition. On this record, I leaned heavily into that.”

Where ‘Big Ideas’ really differs in her work though is conceptually and thematicallty in terms of the lyrics and the stories she wanted to tell. “I focused on the songwriting and the storytelling and the honesty. I wanted to open myself up a little bit more to people,” she reflects. “I think that on my past albums, I tended to write really image-focused and metaphorically, which I love, but I’ve realised that sometimes that can create a disconnect between me and the audience in some way or just a disconnect between what I want them to understand about me.”