“It was written in such a fleeting way because I was very untethered to anything – writing became a very grounding practice in a very ungrounded time.”

On the tail-end of a week travelling the UK with Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS World Tour and at the precipice of four nights at London’s O2 Arena plus a headlining show at Electric Brixton, Remi Wolf meets me at Hoxton Square to discuss her sophomore album and, appropriately, the moments of transience that came to shape its identity. “It is very much a tour album without talking about tour and shows — it’s everything that’s surrounding the thing.”

Finding a week or two here and there to get in the studio between a continuous cycle of tours and travel, Wolf wrote Big Ideas in five distinct portions of time between the end of 2021 and the middle of 2023. Home in Los Angeles for a mere six weeks during 2022, Wolf had to find a grounding constant outside of a physical space or city. For her, that became writing. In New York and LA, at studios such as Electric Lady and Conway, she would take all of her experiences and emotions from months on the road and pour them onto the page. “Each chunk of time really was such a different world,” she tells me. “Different people were involved in each and they each had their own really strong vibe. Then I picked songs from each chunk to make the album.”

A natural reflection of these disconnected times with the throughline of seeking connection in an overstimulating world, Big Ideas is the result of 40-50 drafted tracks. The ones that made the cut — such as lead single “Cinderella” and sister songs “Toro” and “Alone in Miami” — tell this tale not only through vivid lyrical storytelling, but through the momentum of Wolf’s experimental production, with bubbling, addictive sonics that will make your soul feel in motion, even if the end destination is unknown. Full of fleeting novelas and love letters to fever dream memories, the album captures its author’s life much like a collection of personal essays or a book of short stories. Authentic, vibrant, and complex.

Two songs that were written in the same chunk of time – during a studio session in LA a month or so after the events they discuss took place – are “Toro” and “Alone in Miami,” which Wolf explains are meant to be listened to together. Two parts to the same story, which involves Art Basel and an “unhinged,” “psychotic week” of “sexcapades”, the songs are placed side by side on the tracklist for a reason. “Those two are supposed to be listened to together because of the storyline, but also I think that they kind of illustrate this wild juxtaposition of travelling, which is you can be so connected and having sex with somebody and so intertwined in that way and then travel and realise the kind of despair of being alone, which is so heightened by not having a solid home or home base. Travelling around is such a rollercoaster of emotions and of experiences and those two songs together really kind of show how crazy it can be. It really was a wild time in my life.”

While Wolf may have felt alone on tour, in the studio, she filled the space with more collaborators than she had ever dared work with before. The follow up to 2021’s Juno, which Wolf wrote in solitary during pandemic lockdowns, Big Ideas saw more collaborative studio sessions and outside voices – both a creative dream and a mental battle. “[Juno] was such an insulated experience because of COVID. And because of that, everything became super instinctual and there wasn’t a lot of chatter or any other opinions clouding the art in any way. Because this record was made in a more open world, more people were involved — who I willingly brought in and wanted there – but I had to learn how to really make sure that I was still deeply intact with my pure intuition, which was such a huge part of the first album.” She pauses. “It’s so hard, but it’s something that I have to be so in tune with constantly. It’s kind of my job to be deeply in tune with what I need and what I want and what feels genuine and authentic to me. It’s something I am constantly thinking about and I think I’ve been sharpening that skill with this record. It was bolstered by album one — I think I learned it in that record or even in my first two EPs — but then it was put to the test.”

When looking for collaborators, Wolf often turns to friends of friends who she knows will have a similar mindset to creative collaboration. “I like to surround myself with people who want to get down and dirty and make some new ass shit. Which was the fun in bringing new people in for this album; I found so many more like-minded humans. And I love everyone that I worked with in making this record. It was so expansive.”

Bridging the prior album with its new counterpart, Wolf released “Cinderella” as the debut single – which she calls a “beautiful link” between her past and present work. “ I think it was a nice entry into the new sounds because it still has a lot of my funk and pop and lyrical motifs that my other music has — but still coming at it from a different, more kind of analog, more polished, more warm-sounding lens. The horns are fun, it just gets you moving and grooving. It’s a very “Remi Wolf song,” or at least people will tell me it is.”

Does she disagree? “No, it’s such a me song, I fucking love the song. But I don’t put myself in a box ever, I never have any agenda going into writing of how anything’s gonna sound. With this music, it’s a big variety show, a circus of a sound. Every song is their own little character in the circus.” Using old synthesisers (primarily an M1 and a Prophet), Wolf played around with out-of-the-box sounds, giving each track its own sonic identity full of delicious treats and unexpected turns. “I like painting really vivid pictures with sound. Fun little sounds, like bubbles or water, I just want to hear that stuff — it’s like candy, you want to lick it.”

However, it was the most stripped back song on the album, “Just The Start,” that gave fans their real first taste of Big Ideas. Released online before any official singles, the track not only stood out from Wolf’s past music in its simple soundscape and raw lyricism, but served as a sort of statement for what was to come. Written alone in a hotel room at 4 AM (“that’s kind of the theme of this record, honestly”) after a week of writing, it captures an artist’s conflicting relationship with their job, while more broadly speaking on the complicated dichotomies of young adulthood that resonate with listeners worldwide.

“I was deeply in my feelings, but also feeling really inspired,” she explains. “I was just feeling existential, I guess, about being an artist and being in this world and working. I was burnt out and having all these conflicting thoughts about what I was doing and how tired I was and how much I was partying – and how I didn’t want to party, but I couldn’t not, and how I didn’t want to work, but I couldn’t not. I brought the lyrics into the studio the next day with a vague semblance of a melody, and then my friend Paul and I decided it should just be me and the guitar. So we recorded it like that. I let it sit for a long time and then it just stood out as something.”

Now firmly placed as one of the final tracks to the album, “Just The Start” serves another purpose as well: as a reminder that there is no real end to our complicated, messy, wonderful stories. There is no simple fairy-tale ‘happily ever after’ or clean cut finish line, but rather a cyclical metamorphosis of endings turning to beginnings. And even as Wolf boards her flight back to her home country, hopefully gaining a moment’s rest with feet planted firmly on familiar soil and the feeling of transience now memorialised in song, she is not at the end of a road – but the beginning of something new. And as the album winds down and we hear the starting notes of the familiar track, we are reminded that we are all constantly in motion, no matter where we are. So we press replay.

Stream Big Ideas now…