“This is the saddest album I’ve ever written,” Remi Wolf says of Mud. “But at the same time, it was the most fun record I’ve ever written in my life.”
Mud dropped on Friday via Island Records and marks the third studio album for Wolf, a record that edges far closer to folk music than either of the alt-pop star’s first two LPs. It’s an album she started writing in late 2024 after five years of relentless touring began to give way to stress, angst, professional burnout, and the end of a relationship. The title takes its name from the track “Covered in Mud,” as does the album artwork, which depicts the singer splattered in dirt. That’s how Wolf’s life was looking at the time: messy.
“I hadn’t been in one place for more than two months for, like, five years,” she says. “I was feeling kind of lost and confused and was going through a breakup.”
She set out for Nashville, despite never having worked there before, and took a gamble on the city’s writing culture. “It was kind of like an experiment: ‘If I went to Nashville for two weeks, let’s see what would happen,’” she says. While there, she slowly came up with an aesthetic for Mud: every song should lend itself to being played around a campfire on acoustic guitar. The city’s emphasis on writing helped light her path. “It’s so adamant about storytelling,” she says. “It’s really a song-first mentality there.”
But the California native also felt the pull of her home state and, with some songs in hand for Mud, she moved on to Big Bear, California, with a group of close friends, including longtime collaborator Jared Solomon. Wolf says she was feeling vulnerable and wanted to be surrounded by people who loved her. They rented a house. Wolf cooked family dinners. And they wrote 16 songs that week, including “I Won’t Cry” — a defiant ballad that plays out over acoustic guitar and pop-style percussion while Wolf sings, “You can spin me like a record babe, run me back and press replay/I could be your favorite track.” In fact, she cites it as her favorite on Mud.
“That week was the best I’d felt in a really long time,” she says. “Making music at this time in my life was just incredibly healing. I had so many feelings I had been kind of repressing for a while, and I had to bury down. Being with my friends and my family, I was allowed to be a hundred percent vulnerable and a hundred percent myself.”
From the outset, Wolf has made herself at home in the gray area where alt-pop meets folk. When her 2025 set at Bonnaroo was canceled after heavy rains inundated the festival grounds, Wolf’s team booked a pop-up show for her at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl. She played an all-covers set, which included Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” and brought a parade of guests onstage: Gigi Perez, Vampire Weekend’s Brian Jones, the guitarist Grace Bowers, Grouplove, Medium Build, Mt. Joy, and Hayley Williams (its official name was “Remi Wolf’s Insanely Fire 1970s Pool Party Superjam”). Later that summer, Wolf was a featured act at the Healing Appalachia benefit headlined by Tyler Childers and Chris Stapleton. She has also been a two-time showcase artist at the Newport Folk Festival and was a special guest of Williams’ at this year’s event.
Wolf gave fans their first taste of Mud at Newport when she and Williams sang “Twiggy,” Wolf’s first new music in two years. “Twiggy” plays out over a fingerpicked acoustic guitar arrangement and drips with post-breakup heartache. “Where you saw independence, I saw being reckless,” Wolf sings. She and Williams have similar singing styles — “loud and belty” is Wolf’s description — so when the Paramore founder reached out about sitting in at Newport, Wolf thought “Twiggy” would be a natural choice.
“It was so fucking cool,” Wolf recalls. “I sent it to her, and immediately, she goes, ‘Yes! We are doing this!’ She was the first person outside of my inner circle to really hear the song.”
Wolf has two album-release shows planned. The first is set for the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Saturday, and the second will be at New York’s Webster Hall on Oct. 13. She has a short Australian tour lined up for December, too, and will canvas the U.S. beginning in February in Washington, D.C. She’s been sober for more than a year and wrote most of the album under the clarity of sobriety. Combine that with therapy and her personal journey of writing and recording Mud, and Wolf is in optimal headspace for a return to the road.
“I’ve finally gotten a long enough break that I’m really itching to get back out there,” she says. “There’s so many pressures to keep touring and touring and touring, but for me it became a matter of health in general. My mental health was in the toilet. My physical health was in the toilet. I needed to stop. When you’re doing it for so long without a break, it’s difficult.”
Now, you can sum up her approach to touring as Remi first. “I want to prioritize my health and the health of my band and my crew, and just go out there and put on the best show possible in the healthiest way for me,” she says. “I’ll probably be totally sober and fuckin’ rocking.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
