Remi Wolf’s Mud arrives not as a retreat but as a recalibration: the Los Angeles pop maximalist has traded some of her glitter for grit, and the result is an excellent, unexpectedly tender record that still knows how to move.
Released on 9 October, her third album takes the mess of a breakup, touring burnout and a changing relationship with alcohol, then turns it into eleven songs that are warm, spacious and quietly defiant.
The title is the thesis. Mud is not simply something to wash off; it is the ground you crawl through, the stuff that gets under your fingernails and, eventually, the place from which something new grows. Wolf sounds less interested in winning the breakup than in telling the truth about it. Her voice remains the great constant: raspy, playful, capable of a wink one moment and a wounded belt the next. Even when the arrangements pull back, she fills the room.
That is not to say the fun has been scrubbed away. Covered in Mud has a bluesy, swaggering strut, while Bottle and I Won’t Cry keep enough funk-pop snap to remind you this is the same artist who once made chaos sound like a party. But the biggest pleasure here is hearing Wolf slow down. Jamie opens with spoken-word candour before swelling into a sing-speak-to-soul belter, and Yellow Rose closes the album with fingerpicked patience rather than a fireworks display. It is a braver kind of showmanship.
The production, developed with longtime collaborator Solomonophonic, favours live-feeling textures over the bright synthetic rush of earlier records. Seventies soul, nineties alt-rock and a little country twang drift through the mix, giving the album an earthy, handmade quality. It is less frantic than her other albums, but not less ambitious. Wolf has simply learned that restraint can be its own kind of excess.
There are moments where the looseness becomes a little too loose, and a couple of songs linger longer than they need to. Yet even those detours feel purposeful. This is an album about imperfect recovery, after all: about sitting in the discomfort long enough to understand it. The sadness never disappears, but neither does the humour, the melody or the sheer charisma that makes Wolf such a compelling presence.
Mud is excellent because it does not pretend healing is tidy. It is muddy, funny, bruised and beautifully human. Wolf emerges from it renewed, and she brings the listener with her.
