I listen to Remi Wolf’s Mud and feel like I’ve matured. Released in October 2026, the album is a surprising release for a young alt-pop artist known mostly for fuck-around crassness and violent wordplay. Mud has hints of that younger Wolf, but it finds its vigor instead through Wolf’s propulsive storytelling, tremendous instincts for narrative climax, and explosive vocals. It’s my album of the year, but a bit of a disappointment to some longer-term Wolf fans.
It’s odd to be a fan of an artist who’s around your age, to realize they’ve aged and changed alongside you. The first song I heard from Wolf was “Liz,” a live staple and standalone single that dropped on January 1, 2021. I was sixteen and angsty; Wolf was in her early twenties and also angsty. The single’s cover on Spotify seemed telling: a young woman, Wolf, turns over her shoulder and stares right into the camera. She’s wearing a hardly-present bikini top and a big colorful hat, and stands in front of a neon, psychedelic TV-static blur of sky. It’s both bubbly bright and a bit haunting, much like the song. A swinging drumline and step-touching backup vocals ring almost like a barbershop quartet, easy and quiet and lyrically mostly in the third person, telling the story of its protagonist. Then Wolf turns the lyrical mirror on herself as she croons and yearns for Liz, who’s revealed to be an ex. It’s a song about Liz, and about loneliness, and about being young and feeling big things about the people in your life changing. At the time, I didn’t dig any deeper into her discography, content with her one algorithmically-circulated contribution to my playlists.
It wasn’t until Mud released in October, however, that I finally dug into Wolf’s discography. I rode around New Haven on my bike blasting her early singles, her debut album, her sophomore release, and Mud, again and again, flabbergasted and regretful that I hadn’t been listening to her for years. She tried American Idol and studied music in college, then began releasing singles and remixes through 2019 and 2020. Dominic Fike remixed her early hit “Photo ID,” and Beck hopped on a remix of “Sauce,” both off her second EP I’m Allergic to Dogs! Wolf was a voice for the feral side of Gen Z, for the queer and violent and anxiety-prone young people who liked to be audacious and provocative just for their own sakes. Her debut album, Juno, sparkles and stabs like a neon hyperpop-encrusted armadillo rolling around a vintage store breaking everything glass. The album begins with a record-stratching synthesized guitar riff in “Liquor Store,” Wolf introduces herself:
I’m a thrift store baddie with my booty on the sink,
I’m a shitty ex-nanny with my marbles on the brink
Of spilling all over the carpet, the kitchen floor
You clean them up with a mop in a liquor store
It’s a declaration of not giving a fuck, a shouted arrival of someone brash and. She’d say whatever the fuck she wanted. Her sound on Juno seems at once influenced by Lil Wayne’s wordplay, Charli XCX’s fuck-around vibe, and SZA’s silky raw pop. She seems to delight in her youth, hopping into a high, childlike tone on “Liquor Store” to chant “You, motherfucker, you you motherfucker!” and using a true baby voice on the unsettling outro of a “full on psycho song” called “Quiet on Set.” That song also includes the lyric, “Orgy at Five guys with five guys / That’s ten guys and holy Christ / I’ve never seen more nuts in my life,” which is both a reason alone to listen to the song and entirely extraneous. Wolf’s instinct on Juno was to fuck around, to depict her life and experiences through the very Gen Z aesthetic of random-for-random’s-sake.
Wolf’s vibe on Juno reminds me of how I felt during COVID—wild, lashing out just for fun, and reeking of childishness. I’m too old for that; I want music of more substance now. Wolf does too. She released her sophomore album, Big Ideas, in 2024, which steps closer to a more mainstream pop sound, but in Mud she discovers something entirely new. The big feelings and lyrical fun remain, but Wolf wields them a bit more sparingly. The opener, “Bottle,” is a thematic successor to “Liquor Store,” but instead of relishing in her chaos, Wolf introspects. “I’m off and on and off again / On and off and on again / I pull up, screw my head on straight / I grew up, and I stay the same,” she sings in the chorus. On the bridge of “Bottle,” she reaches not for baby-voiced expletives but a shattering climax that seems to strain her voice right up to its breaking point, singing
I’m an idiot now
But I’ll turn it around
It’s a long way down
Drop top — Headshot — Baddie with the big bucks
Yeah, I’m bitching and pouting
Shoulda never showed up but I did
Yeah, I gotta get out
Can’t get the bottle if I don’t get up
She’s still self-deprecating, still finding quick staccato rhymes that pound like petulant stomps, but her lyrics hint towards change. “Liquor Store” was released just a year after Wolf got sober in rehab for alcohol use disorder; “Bottle” comes five years later. The wounds have healed, and the writing is more thoughtful. It’s a song bubbling not with rage but an odd, urgent sort of hope.
The whole album contains the same, complex kind of maturity. “Covered in Mud,” the album’s titular song, is a country-tinged lament of lostness—not the daggerlike ecstatic lostness of youth, as in Wolf’s earlier work, but the sticky morass of one’s thirties. She’s less focused on the pulsing chaos inside her brain and more on how she feels. Other songs like “I Won’t Cry” and “Guess” also lean slower, more acoustic, more attuned to melody and big feelings than spunky production. Even on “Jamie,” the album’s five-minute centerpoint and climax, where spoken-word verses drip with a sensuality that creeps and an escalating series of choruses get so combustive they might as well explode any speakers they play from—even on “Jamie,” she sounds older. Compared to “Liz,” whose brilliance comes from a wandering story that ends with a twist, “Jamie” is a laser-guided narrative missile which explodes precisely as its creator intended.
In his Pitchfork review of Mud, however, Enzo Ensober seems a little disappointed in the album’s maturity. “Too often, a pop singer’s maturity comes at the expense of her whimsy,” he begins.
Listeners on Reddit agreed. Under a post titled “Mud Album Review” by u/HearthSt0n3r, one commenter writes, “Doesn’t have as much adventurous and quirky instrumentation that Big Ideas had.”
Another writes, “I’ve been disappointed a bit by the singles. They seem to lack the edge I love.”
Yet another: “The album isn’t as quirky and funky as her usual, which is a bummer for me personally.”
None of their reviews were pure laments, of course—Wolf is too charismatic to disappoint anyone fully—but that these fans had hoped for just more of what they’d had before seems an interesting test of a fandom’s willingness to adapt alongside their star. The last year has seen new releases from Dominic Fike, Olivia Rodrigo, and Charli XCX, all of which showcase the maturation of reputationally young and brash artists. Most of these have been met with acclaim and support from their fans, a clear sign, to me, that what seemed like an impending late-stage Taylor Swiftification of the music industry—where artists pumped out same-sounding music under different visual aesthetics—is no longer a threat. Culture evolves, artists evolve, we evolve. Five years ago we were mopping up our marbles in a liquor store, and now we’re covered in mud, just like we should be.
