MFA0002: Remi Wolf - 'Big Ideas' (2024)
The pop star our generation needs, because she's got our pathological inability to take anything seriously but, as opposed to most who are trying, allows herself to have fun instead, which opens the door for a lot of creative half-melodies ('Anthony Kiedis' and 'Guerilla' from the first album) and silly lyrics that are actually worth listening out for because they'll make you laugh, snippets of mundane real life slipping into the actual text of the song but too fast for them to be mis-assigned importance ("eatin' Cubanos by myself", "the walls are closing in in this art deco museum", "the things we do are so deplorable!" "y'know what I'm talking about? You betterrr"). When irreverence manifests as free-associative pop genre pastiche (dig the G-funk synth at 1:40 into 'Toro'), smashing ideas into one another in service of colour and play, run through neon-digital collage production that crushes and zaps-off-kilter familiar production flourishes, all over bass-cranked boom-bap drums... that sounds like a great way to help make sure pop music can actually start to move forward again.
Big Ideas isn't as good as her debut record Juno largely because it isn't as casually inventive, doubling down on the soul grooves as it tones down the goofy production, trading half-rapping for the most charming screamed-myself-hoarse-rehearsing choruses out there right now. Regardless, Remi gets an allowance of at least one song worthy of instant and outright love per year, and for 2024 that was 'Toro', a genuinely inflamed sex song miraculously devoid of cringeworthy bits or not going deep enough, about going at it too loudly in a hotel. The goal was presumably to saturate the sunny disco groove as much as possible until it sounded appropriately hot and heavy - the low end on the bass and drums sounds like drowning in blackberry squash, acidic bass squelch-growls on the chorus and a tremendous 'VROOOM!' sound right before the title drops. Remi herself is a treat too, audibly panting between lines on the first chorus (before giving way to a big purplish electric guitar and vibra-slap), squeaking and yelling the verse with harder and louder. Dig how the next song, 'Alone In Miami' - a yearning song - follows up on the ridiculous soldier parody line “I fly to Miami in the morning” from ‘Toro’s bridge - it turns out it was actually true, and Remi spends it getting lost and desperate, sonically getting closer to alt-rock than ever before.
Elsewhere, ‘Motorcycle’ gets too spare in its seriousness where plenty of the record mixes its joys and concerns with muscular lack of reserve, breaking out only the slow tempo and sleepy beachside guitar to accompany its myopia, but ‘Cinderella’ has an amazingly liquid neo-soul groove, grounded in a paint-spattering electric organ that really does evoke the yellow and purple she sings about. The classic phased guitar and sunny horns don’t stop a sports whistle from poking through, nor the ping of a desk bell to accompany the ‘me and the boys in the hotel lobby!’ hook, secretly the least-catchy part of the song: the bridge is an effortlessly dense-yet-smooth sway into the chorus, which sounds like a great time, and the goofy memetic quality of the hotel lobby line runs the risk of it being the main takeaway in a song that presents her best groove since 2023’s ‘Prescription’.
‘Soup’ steals a huge synth-pop atmosphere and drum beat from the magnificent Sky Ferreira’s playbook (the only pop star going right now who understands how huge the best synth-pop hits sound), except where her new ‘Leash’ single only got more mechanistic with its baggy beat, Remi’s stays liquid and overdriven. We’ve seen plenty of pop songs recently based around longing, and plenty based around some embarrassing, cruelly mundane indignity of normal life, but too many longing songs forget to make its sound unflinchingly sincere to match, and too many of the latter trade in an ironic self-deflection that are generally too dippy to be relatable and too profane in their mundanity to actually create a sense of pathos. With her giant rhythm section and throat-shredding voice, never afraid to push herself beyond her technical limit to express her feelings even when it sounds so young, so desperate, Remi Wolf manages to make a song whose hook is about driving to get soup manifest into what these little indignities so often end up really being about: caring for your partner but performing ultimately different roles in the relationship, and worrying that you’ll grow apart because neither understands the whole self of the other. Pathos doesn’t come from subject matter, whether thats a breakup or the trembling doubts in the everyday failings that might lead to one, but execution, and Remi Wolf understands that getting personal doesn’t need to mean getting into diary concerns or ‘unguarded’ sketches of instrumentation. She’s bright and colourful and totally ridiculous, but she shows up to her own emotions and throws them out with a voice that cracks over irony and reserve, and her band never ends up sounding like they don’t want you to dance your ass off with soul colour even if you’re crying in your bedroom. She’s one of the best pop stars going these days, and she deserves all the flowers she can get.
B+.