On the final day of making the world within her new album, Remi Wolf created mud. Well, sort of. She had an assist from Home Depot. “This is a PSA,” she warns for anyone else wanting to try and play God with the Earth. “You cannot go to the hardware store and buy bags of dirt. You got to get some nice quality stuff … because the stuff at Home Depot will give you some viruses.”

Wolf learned this the hard way as she and her friend Cole headed to L.A.’s Topanga Canyon a few months ago to shoot the cover art for her new album, called Mud, and realized that they would have to build their own sludgy pit in So Cal where it rarely rains. “We made some Hollywood mud happen,” Wolf declares with a little wink like she just faked walking on the moon.

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The results were all worth it. Looking like some lost Time magazine cover from a dispatch of Woodstock 1994, Wolf appears on the cover fully caked in grime, hands on either side of her face and wearing a huge shit-eating smile like she’s just seen the most beautiful thing in the world. And she kind of did. What she saw was her future waiting for her on the other side of the record.

“The message of the album is really feeling like you’re trudging through the gunk but coming out on the other side and feeling cleansed and finding the beauty in that struggle,” she explains. “That really was the record process for me. I went into it feeling very, very lost and very confused in my life.” 

After releasing her trio of “Dog” EPs, finding virality with her 2020 TikTok hit “Photo ID,” and being signed by Island Records, Wolf’s life didn’t wholly belong to her anymore. She spent the past five years on the road, a combo of headline dates to promote 2021’s Juno and 2024’s Big Ideas or opening dates for Halsey, Paramore, and Olivia Rodrigo where Wolf successfully got audiences acquainted with her weirdo pop style and colorful persona that’s like ripping open a bag of human Skittles. But that meant spending more time in “the hotel lobby” than at home.

“And I was just really tired and had been repressing a lot of feelings,” she admits, eventually turning to music and nature as coping mechanisms. Wolf gathered up a group of friends, rented Airbnbs in Big Bear and Joshua Tree, and started drowning herself in Mud. “Being able to get those feelings out, surrounded by the people I loved who made the record with me, I really turned a chapter in my life that was full of a lot of turmoil and hard times into something that’s healing and very beautiful. In the end, making this record was one of the best times of my life.”

Now fully cleaned up in a fresh paisley sweater and one of her go-to trucker hats, Wolf is currently on her manager’s laptop inside a hideaway room at Electric Lady Studios in New York. It’s where she eventually recorded Mud inside walls that whisper about the unreal history of the recording haven, which was first commissioned by Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and became the hallowed ground of sessions for Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Bowie, and most recently, Jack Antonoff. “The first time I ever came here, I remember getting chills when I walked through the doors,” says Wolf, who also recorded Big Ideas in the same spot. “There’s a magical energy here.”

Today, however, the walls are coming alive with the sounds of Mud. Wolf is doing a listening event for 25 lucky fans who get to hear the album before anyone else, although she doesn’t seem exactly comfortable with the idea. “Oh my God, they’re really blasting my album out there,” she says, wincing at hearing herself sing while she’s being interviewed, as if to say, I didn’t plan this.

There’s probably also still some uneasiness with how much vulnerability comes out in the album. Where most may know her from the hyper pop of “Cinderella,” Mud is less about the princess story and more about the orphan who’s on her hands and knees furiously scrubbing the floors clean until she can see her own reflection and hope she recognizes it. The album kicks off with the heartfelt dialogue of “Bottle,” where Wolf openly discusses her ongoing journey with sobriety. “I can’t get the bottle if I don’t get up. I can’t get drunk if I don’t got drugs,” she sings, spilling about the mental tug of war behind addiction.

Later, songs like the R&B-folk fusion of “Champagne” and the hopscotch pop of “Wine Drunk” may seem like companion tracks on the surface, but they’re more about the highs (and lows) of doomed relationships. “Baby, I’m wine drunk for you,” Wolf fangirls in one minute before crashing out with “I’m always waiting here for someone to choke me down like cheap champagne.” The soft single “Twiggy” further decries the incompatible attachment styles she gets herself into and mourns her crushes with flat butts.

To complement these raw themes, Mud was made with a more down-to-earth approach that befits its role as a “breakup record and return to Saturn record,” the 30-year-old talent has shared in press materials. There’s less of the high flair production and programmed loops and quirks that have appeared on songs like “Sexy Villain” or “Disco Man” and more grounded instrumentation, like acoustic guitars and naked drums, that allow all of Wolf to come through.

Her emotions take up a lot of space on a ballad like “Guess,” where she wonders why “it hurts how much I want what I give away” or the climactic ending track “Yellow Rose” where she struggles with a big transition—clawing her way out of a relationship she feels trapped in. The flower typically signals the idea of new beginnings and brighter outlooks, and by the end of Mud, it feels like Wolf is giving herself her own flowers.

“For me, Mud became this symbol for emotional sludge and freedom. It’s fucking dirty. It’s gross. But once you wipe it off, there’s minerals. You’re exfoliated. Dirt is magical, you know?” she says, pleading her case. “Think about festivals in the rain, there’s nothing more bonding than being in a miserable place with someone. A trauma bond is fucking real. It fucking bonds people together. I think there’s something liberating about that. We don’t get to get dirty very often.”

That is, unless you’re Remi Wolf in the middle of Topanga Canyon on a mission. If she’s being honest, though, there was an ulterior motive to the photo shoot. “It was kind of a test for me to see if I could be on ‘Survivor,’” she declares, like she hopes Jeff Probst is listening. “I love ‘Survivor.’ It was kind of like my own personal audition. And I will tell you, I failed.”

Of course, Wolf is no stranger to reality TV. When she was still in high school, the Palo Alto, California, native got through early rounds of “American Idol” before being cut during the “Hollywood week” episode and sparing herself the wrath of Simon Cowell. “Thank fucking God. Literally, God bless my angels up there. They’re doing something right because I’m very happy I did not get too far on that show,” she says, looking up to the ceiling to make sure her message is heard. “All the love to those who have. But I’ve enjoyed my own personal path I think much more than I would have enjoyed the ‘Idol’ path for me.”

Still, her own path to making the music she creates today could be its own scripted series, with one major plot twist some didn’t see coming. As a kid, Wolf was a fierce competitive skier and even represented the U.S. in the Youth Olympic Games twice. But when she was in the chalet sipping on hot chocolate and eating chili, she was thinking up songs in her head.

“I think the first time I ever really sang on stage, I was in fourth grade,” she recites. “I was at a talent show on a farm that I went to over the summer with my friend’s family. We sang ‘Lucky’ by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat and I think that really started it off. I was like, oh, I like singing. I like being on stage.” 

Soon enough, that morphed into forming a group where the young ensemble cut their teeth on “barbershop quartet-style arrangements” of vintage tunes like “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Lollipop,” where Wolf learned how to harmonize. “But once I was 15, hormonally something changed and my voice kind of dropped and I developed a rasp and I was like, oh, wait, this is actually kind of cool.” So, she had a choice to make: music or moguls. “And now I’m here,” she concludes, conjuring the same wide smile that’s on her album cover.

Wolf is quick to scapegoat her perfectionism and ADHD for how things turned out, but there’s also the fact that she’s a master manifester. It’s one of the gifts of being Sicilian (on her mom’s side; her dad has Russian and Persian heritage). It’s something we have in common, and we immediately start to trade stats on how much of the “gift” we each have. Sicilians have a history of superstition, witchcraft, and folk magic that have made some believe they have strong intuitions. At least it’s made the two of us believe.

“I’ve been to a couple psychics who have told me that I am tapped in, and I do feel tapped in in certain ways,” she admits. “I don’t know if I’m out here casting spells or anything like that, but I am a pretty powerful manifester, I will say. I’ve actually written a lot of songs where what I’ve said in the song has come true in my real life.”

She gives examples like writing lyrics in “Front Tooth” about a “house on escrow” not long before she bought one in L.A. “It’s kind of weird. The woman who lived there before me was an eclectic lady, and she put snowboards all over the outside of the house. And there’s all these little trinkets everywhere, hidden in little corners that I just haven’t taken down,” she says, giving the best verbal tour she can. “It’s filled with a lot of art I’ve made … and my collection of little weird masks. But honestly, it’s mainly clothing. I have so many clothes that I’ve collected over the years.” In New York, she’s had some time to add to her wardrobe with her focus lately on Uggs, striped sweaters, and hats. “Always hats.”

Another of these woo-woo examples is how she manifested John Mayer for Mud. “The first time we ever connected was because he really loved my song ‘Liz’ [from 2021], and he reached out to me. I’d been a fan of his since I was very young. He was my first concert I ever went to because my mom was obsessed with him.” 

The two musicians have gabbed on DMs in recent years—”I’d ask him questions about touring and stuff, and he’d kind of gas me up and be like, ‘You’re doing great,’” Wolf shares—so, when she wrote the new folk lullaby “Moon So High” and had a duet in mind, she took a shot. “I manifested it for two months! But one day, I was just like, you know what? Fuck it. I’m just gonna DM him and see what happens. Two hours later, he got back to me and a week later, we were in the studio. … It was like a childhood dream coming true. And I felt very, very blessed that he said yes.”

Blessed, yes, but that same Sicilian superstition is at least partly responsible. “I have an obsession with people whose names start with ‘J’,” she admits. “I don’t know how this happened, but it has just become a theme.” On Mud, she not only worked with John Mayer, but also go-to collaborators Jared Solomon and Jack DeMeo, and a new muse Jamie McLaughlin, whom the spacey spoken word “Jamie” is all about. “It’s my letter. And I don’t know why. But I love a good J.”

So, if your name is Jessica or Jeremy or Jennifer or Joseph, this album is for you. Or really for anyone with a beating heart. 

“I hope that these songs resonate with people on an emotional level. I feel like I really let myself spill my own tea on this record. I was super honest, and so I hope that people hear the music and it helps them heal in some sort of way,” Wolf says, for what she hopes the 25 people at tonight’s listening party will take away, and the hopefully 25 million more who will hear it once it’s out October 9. 

“But I don’t want to put any expectations on anyone. I want everybody to kind of have their own journey with the record and take what they want from it,” she adds, as messy and dirty as that may be. Because as she’d be the first to tell you, being clean is boring.

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