Mud is Remi Wolf’s third studio album, released with high suspense two years after Big Ideas in 2024, and five years after her smash debut Juno in 2021. Other pop artists could take after Remi’s patient cultivation of an album, as Mud is ripe with brilliance that encapsulates an exciting new era of her sound.
In “Covered in Mud,” Wolf complains “Nothing I do, nothing I write sounds like all the hits on the radio,” but Mud is perhaps Wolf’s most adaptable album, with tracks being arguably comparable to the sound of other contemporary pop legends like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan (don’t believe me? Listen to “Champagne” or “Burn Me Blue”). Of course, Wolf maintains her own unique style through her inimitable voice, brazen storytelling, and dry humor. Wolf has the habit of making her catchiest lines the most vulnerable confessions, as she proves in opening track “Bottle,” where you’ll catch yourself absent-mindedly singing along to her struggles about alcoholism while you drive to work. Wolf’s ironic tone is part of her charm, her sarcastic digs at exes resembling a bag of potato chips you can’t stop eating.
Remi’s Wolf’s ability to be enveloped by the “mud” of life and still persist in seeing the humor and beauty of it is a hallmark of her music.
Mud’s eleven songs could be best portrayed within the imagery of a single day, the first half of the album (tracks 1-6) resembling the hours in which the sun is out: fast, loud, and bright. The latter half of the album (tracks 7-11) can be likened to night, as its ballads reveal to us Wolf’s reflective and moody soft side. This organization makes the most sense, as any other ordering would surely give the listener whiplash. However, the tempo shift has the potential lose us in the comedown. Wolf opens the album with possibly six of her best tracks yet, each one booming with energetic production and pinnacle flavor. It’s no wonder that when she flips the switch into John Mayer mode (literally, he’s featured on “Moon So High”) and stays there, the momentum falls flat. It’s sort’ve like having the best night of your life downtown, then arriving home to your partner crying. Wolf does attempt to break it up with “Wine Drunk” at track nine, but to no avail, as it’s perhaps the weakest song on the album.
Mud’s first single was “Twiggy,” track three, which captured fans with its snarky mantra (“twiggy little butt you got”) and intensive climax.
“You don’t fucking miss me, you don’t fucking miss me / You just miss your mother, you forgot I raised you / Lost another passport, God I fuckin’ / God I fuckin’, God, I fuckin’ hate you”
As passionate as “Twiggy” is, it doesn’t compare to the slow-burning, sultry nature of Wolf’s “Jamie.” Positioned at track five, right after twangy slayer “Burn Me Blue,” “Jamie” secures the most intriguing song on the album, beginning with Wolf’s seductive, spoken word narration of her killing a past lover:
“And I’m standing there / on the grave I dug up / There you were, Jamie / A pile of bones and a blue solo cup”
The first verse classicly encapsulates Wolf’s style: telling the story of a murder with a sexy smile on her face, making the listener her closest friend. Wolf transitions out of the jazzy, spoken exposition when she breaks into the first chorus, thick with metaphor, comparing herself to a dog playing fetch with her lover. She references to the post-mortem effects of their relationship, claiming,
“You’re in everything now / Like a beautiful rain cloud / Like the stars in the sky, fluttering by / teasing me”
This more obviously marks the narrator’s obsession with her past lover, which suspensefully amplifies throughout the remainder of the song. Wolf nonchalantly returns to spoken word in the second verse,
“Jamie, I never got to tell you / how much I liked you / How much I respected the way / you put your words together / It always made me feel / so tingly down there / The way your eyes / were a little bit too far apart”
Wolf is phenomenal at saturating her lyrics with detail, likely aiming to make her audience laugh with the extent of her honesty. There’s something about Wolf’s description of her characters that make us believe she is relaying intimate details about her personal life. This reckless truth and authenticity is part of what makes Remi Wolf a pop star.
By the time the second chorus hits, Wolf is no longer exuding the detached aura of a siren who has lazily killed her mate. She foreshadows her defeat with the line, “I’ve been flirting with quicksand,” right before launching into the hook of the song, where Wolf’s tone becomes outwardly desperate, accusing the lover of “messing with me, teasing with me, bleeding me dry.” Now on the opposite end of attachment, Wolf begins wailing her ex-lover’s name, revealing that at the core of her flirtatious taunting is actually insufferable anguish and grief: “Jamie! Jamie! Jamie!”
“Jamie” is an impeccable portrayal of what it feels like to be consumed by limerence for an ex-lover. Presumably, in order to capture such a difficult experience, Wolf had to go through it herself, earning the creative bandwidth to write profoundly vulnerable and relatable lyrics:
“You were an addictive drug / A take-over-my-life type drug / Want you up inside my veins / Want you up inside me”
Just when we think Wolf’s tone has cooled down, she escalates once more. It is this precise tactic that Wolf masterfully executes to emotionally whiplash her audience alongside her. Wolf resumes her raw, chilling vocals screaming Jamie’s name—then, just as immediately, transitions into a captivating outro, gravely suggesting to the object of her misery:
“Let’s do hot yoga / In the building below your apartment / Let’s go get Zyn at the market / Don’t stop what you’re doing to me”
Wolf repeats these suggestions until she’s whispering them, leaving us goosebumped, shellshocked, like parents surviving a monstrous tantrum.
“Jamie” is the epitome of romantic addiction. The narrator begins the song with her lover in the ground—”a pile of bones”—and ends it begging that same lover to “go get Zyn at the market.” Wolf ingeniously drags us through addiction’s unrelenting cycle: death, detachment, nostalgia, admiration, grief, powerlessness, torment, desire, torment… relapse.
Wolf then unveils “Covered in Mud,” the album’s title track and inspiration for its cover art, a continuation of what it means to be stuck in the trenches of heartbreak: “the smoke is billowin’, it smells like him, and I smell like shit.”
Listen to “Jamie”:
Listen to Mud:
Yours
Anna Lucks
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