REMI WOLF
Big Ideas (EMI)
Remi Wolf’s music is finally getting the attention it deserves, due to a high-profile support slot on Olivia Rodrigo’s tour and a stonking Glastonbury performance. Sophomore album Big Ideas is crammed to the brim with them.
Soup is a hairsprayed 1980s belter, the discofied Slay Bitch is Madonna on Holiday and Pitiful sounds like Phoenix in dancing-down-the-corridors mode. There’s the late-afternoon vintage-Winehouse soul of Motorcycle, where Remi – backed by the Dap-Kings and produced by Kenny Beats and Leon Michels, who has also done fine work on Clairo’s latest – explores how stability and freedom can coexist.
Alone In Miami is more scuffy, riffing on Radiohead’s Paranoid Android; Cherries And Cream is a tasty slice of 70s psychedelia with more ooh-la-la’s than the Faces, and rhe acoustic lo-fi of Just The Start could be a Mouldy Peaches number. Kangaroo is deliciously hooky too, its catchy pop chorus (“Oh please stay / Call me honey / Go upstate, make some money”) blending The Killers and Katy Perry.
With a heap of singalong choruses, offbeam melodies and genre mashups, Big Ideas is perfect pop for big thinkers from Remi Wolf.
words CHRIS SEAL
