Remi Wolf
Big Ideas
ISLAND
ABOVE THE CURRENT
Since 2019, Remi Wolf has been solidifying her status as a technicolored synth-funk pop connoisseur. On Big Ideas, the follow-up to her 2021 debut Juno, she simultaneously reinforces this fact while also playfully unraveling the expectations that come with it. Across 13 tracks, her stalwart vocals maneuver soundscapes that feel like pivotal scaffolding for wide-screen romantic epiphanies in the cinema of the late ’70s and early ’80s as she sings about running errands for a loved one while recognizing, as the distance grows between them, that she’d do anything for them (“Soup”); having sex loud enough to make other hotel guests bang on her door (“Toro”); and daydreaming about modern domesticity over a cup of coffee (“Motorcycle”). Big Ideas is romantically grand without feeling cliché due to Wolf’s ability to keeps her songs visually gripping without relying on vague metaphors.
Her big ideas this time around are grounded in the distinct realm of relationships, the massive studio production transforming these vignettes into street-length murals. The record loosens up toward the end, though, fragmenting itself in unexpected ways. The last five songs (including the confidently horny bonus track, “Slay Bitch”) are the project’s most intriguing, adventurous, and alluring. But they’re also tracked in a way that makes the journey through them feel like off-roading. “Wave,” for example, begins with a Paul Simon meets Steely Dan psych-funk tension, circled by tip-toeing reverb and chugging percussion. The track mimics its namesake with a grandiose chorus that feels like triumphant arena rock and a cathartic emo meltdown—a little bit Toto and a little bit Linkin Park. It’s a pivotal moment where Wolf further evolves her funk-pop sound into unexpected backflips while never losing sight of the gravity of her vocals. By the next song, Wolf is nearly unrecognizable, her sound rubbed raw like a makeup remover wipe attacking last night’s mascara-stained tears.
The production contribution of Porches’ Aaron Maine is undeniable on “When I Thought of You,” a stripped-back tune with muted guitar, amicable whistles, and a head-scratching mid-song Auto-Tune shift that locks you further in. Yet Juno’s successor feels more curated and honed-in even with these sonic cliff jumps. Acoustic pearl “Just the Start” has Big Ideas taking a Moldy Peaches turn as it boils down the album’s main themes with Wolf contemplating the highs and lows of artistic life, teetering between self-validation and imposter syndrome. It’s a magical moment in which she deflates the panic of an uncomfortable artistic realization (“I don't wanna party, but I don’t really wanna work / Either way, I will be lonely, either way I’m cursed”) with ease, her vocal frankness paired with a lone acoustic guitar like a friend calling you at the exact moment things take a turn for the worse.
Big Ideas largely revolves around constant change at the hands of our surroundings and the people inhabiting that space: “I can be yellow / I can rearrange by the afternoon and I’m purple,” she declares in the album’s opening lyric. She immediately notes that such freedom of choice doesn’t always sprout from positive instincts: “Is there something wrong with the way that I’m designed? / Can’t find comfort in anything.” On “Just the Start” she sounds downright evasive—outrunning anxiety? Others’ expectations? Love or heartbreak?—as on one of the album’s best and perhaps most unsettling verses she touches upon feeding ourselves with other people’s energies, a kind of soul nutrition that’s much more complicated than balancing the five food groups.
All in all, Big Ideas transforms Remi Wolf’s growing pains into insightful vulnerability that, while exhausting at times, never feels exhausted.
