Let’s be honest—pop music has been in dire need of a shake-up for quite some time now. The 2010s was plagued with some of the least interesting music that the genre had offered in decades, with the 2020s so far being a slight step up with slightly more versatile artists such as Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan taking the spotlight. But even still, a great deal of the music that comes from the pop genre in the modern era just feels like it’s lacking in personality, with hundreds of artists having started to blend together into one cohesive, corporate radio slop. You can feel the algorithm embedded in the notes, as if you’re being presented with an auditory manipulation, rather than art.
That being said, Remi Wolf is the complete opposite of everything I just mentioned. You want personality? I can’t think of another artist who is more authentically themselves within their medium. You want color? Well, Remi Wolf cranks that saturation slider up to 100. Not only that, but she’s consistent as well; since her very first single in 2019, she hasn’t dropped the ball once, with every song and project shining bright and vibrant atop a sea of dull, colorless gray.
2021’s debut album Juno is perhaps the best example of Wolf’s excellence, featuring a collection of her best songs to date (at the time). Cuts like Liquor Store, Front Tooth, and the candy-sweet Sexy Villain delivered some of Wolf’s best songwriting and performances to date, proving that not only is she an excellent single artist, but she can put together an great album as well.
So then, when 2024 came around, Remi Wolf quite easily became one of my most anticipated albums of the year, and it’s not hard to see why. This is especially apparent following the release of one of the best songs of her career in 2023’s standalone single Prescription. With all of the hype that I’ve built up for myself leading into her 2024 sophomore record Big Ideas, surely I’m setting myself up for failure here, right? She can’t possibly top her magnificent debut, right? Wrong, and wrong.
To put it short and sweet, Big Ideas is both Remi Wolf’s most refined and mature material to date, while also serving as the most experimental and out-there batch of songs that she’s ever put together. The level of songwriting present on this record is something that is truly unparalleled in the pop genre, to the point where I have no qualms calling this the best pop album of the year, only just barely over halfway through. It’s a true showing of excellence and mastery, in every sense of the words.
Cinderella kicks off the record with booming kick drums and bubbly brass instrumentation, quickly showcasing the talent that you’re in for over the course of the next 40 minutes. It’s a great choice for an opener, perfectly encapsulating a lot of the big ideas that you’ll be hearing on Big Ideas.
Soup follows up with infectiously-catchy earworm vocal melodies synced with a bright, glittery, glistening ’80s-tinged instrumental that highlights the masterclass-level of production present on this album. This song in particular honestly should have been the album’s lead single, as it has the capabilities and ingredients necessary to propel it into TikTok stardom, but perhaps it very well still could garner that level of attention even as a deep cut.
Wolf goes on to beaconize her vocal prowess later in the tracklisting with twin-tracks Toro and Alone In Miami. While Toro leans the more traditional modern pop route, featuring some of the most impressive vocal range ever displayed by Remi Wolf, Alone In Miami dares to be even bigger and better, perhaps even being my personal favorite song on the whole record. The track almost feels like a pop-ified grunge cut, with the vocal melodies in the verses feeling not too far off from something you’d hear in a Nirvana or Alice In Chains song. And it only gets better from there; the explosiveness of the song’s bridge and final chorus is among my favorite moments I’ve ever heard in a pop song, feeling perfectly grandiose and gargantuan.
This brand of genre-bending weirdness and experimentation is a trend throughout the majority of Big Ideas. The psychedelic exquisiteness of Cherries & Cream makes the song feel like a damn-near Pink Floyd song, with its chorus-y, oil color guitar plucks and buzzing bass lines. It’s something that you’d never expect to hear on a pop album in the 2020s, ever, and it works incredibly well here. The song is just so well written, with every lick of instrumentation, every lyric, and every melody fitting like a puzzle piece into the mix.
This is exactly the kind of personality that this genre of music has been missing. While you can hear the influences that went into a lot of these songs, the album is also undeniably and uniquely Remi Wolf. It’s a sheek, glowing kaleidoscope of colors unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and on top of that, it’s executed to damn-near perfection.
But the great thing also on display here is that it doesn’t all need to be different and weird for it to be excellent. Pitiful is the most straightforward pop cut on the album, but is also easily memorable as one of the catchiest melodically, with staccato vocal deliveries bouncing over effervescent keys and rhythmic grooves. Kangaroo is also fairly ordinary, outside of its abrasive instrumental-destruction bridge, which I adore. The song features a massive singalong chorus that is always welcome whenever it makes its return in the song structure.
While the first nine songs on Big Ideas are complete and utter perfection, the album does conclude on a few of its weaker songs. They’re all still good songs, mind you, but they just don’t reach the same level of mastery that the previous run did. When I Thought Of You has some melodic high points, but the instrumental feels a little too stripped back for its own good. If the musical arrangement here felt a little more full, the song would be just as excellent as the rest.
Frog Rock suffers from the exact opposite problem, featuring some of the most lush and bombastic instrumentation on the whole album, but lacking any big vocal moments that would otherwise propel it into greatness. Just The Start also works fine enough as the album’s closing track, but the production value present here just feels a bit off when compared to the rest of the record.
Regardless, even with this small stretch of decent-to-mid songs on the album’s back and, Big Ideas would still get a strong 9/10 rating for me, and quite easily shines as one of the best pop albums of the decade so far. It’s actually pretty hilarious just how far ahead of her peers Remi Wolf is, showcasing an artistic mastery that most can only hope to barely sneeze at once or twice across their entire career. This combination of airtight songwriting perfection and colorful, flourishing production (which features only real instruments, by the way) is something that is rarely seen in this brand of music today, and stands out as a truly special moment for the pop genre. Big Ideas sees Remi Wolf not only continuing her hot streak, but also cementing hers
For fans of: Chappell Roan, Dominic Fike, Glass Animals
‘Big Ideas’ by Remi Wolf is out now on EMI / Island Records.
Words by Hunter Hewgley
