More about: remi wolf

Fiery, chaotic, outrageous and a thousand more adjectives wouldn’t do her justice: if you don’t know Remi Wolf by now, get to know her. The maximalist singer-songwriter powerhouse has been taking the world by storm from the moment of her TikTok virality, fuelled by a snippet of the infectious ‘Photo ID’ which consequently lead to the whirlwind success of her breakthrough debut album Juno.

Remi doesn’t take a second to breathe as she sells out Camden’s KOKO for a night of whack and whimsy, off the back of touring with fellow pop-girly Lorde, and with a long slog of Europe and US headline shows and festivals on the horizon. We had the privilege to sit down with Remi the morning after her KOKO show to chat all things performance, songwriting, collaboration, evolution and impulsivity.

Gigwise: You’ve just finished touring with Lorde and are now about to embark on a long stint of headline shows and festivals. Do you enjoy the challenge of amping up a crowd that may not know Remi?

Remi Wolf: It is kind of fun for me actually…I kind of like the experience of having less pressure, because it is less pressure when they don’t know and if they don’t like it or buy into it then it’s whatever… that’s kind of your problem. I do work my ass off to get the crowd hyped and sound as good as I possibly can! I am a performer so I’m just trying to entertain people.

GW: At last night’s show you asked for a chair for your sprained ankle quite early in the set, but didn’t sit down once and spent the night high-kicking and cart-wheeling. How’s the ankle holding up?

RW: The reason I brought out the chair was because, well, the ankle is sprained but it's not horrible. My bodies in the disintegration period. I sat on it [the chair] like once…I do a bad job of taking care of myself that way. I make the initial effort. It’s a general theme in my life, and then I just don’t follow through.

GW: With all the confidence and craziness you exude on stage it’s hard to imagine you ever get nervous? Do the nerves ever kick in?

RW: I do, yesterday before the show but as soon as I step on stage it immediately goes away and then I’m just comfortable as shit. It’s a home away from home at this point. Busking was my early stuff. Since I was 14, I’ve just been performing pretty much my whole life. Even before the busking I was doing little shows in my backyard, in my friend’s backyards. 

Performance is one of the pillars of my life, which is so hard when I feel injured. It kind of messes with my identity, I’m like: 'what if I can’t do this? Who am I?'

GW: Is there a pre-show ritual?

RW: Yeah me and my band get together in a circle, we shake out all of our limbs and then we do a little chant. Each day we have a different five letter word that we chant.

GW: What was last night’s?

RW: Conor [referencing her drummer/bestie], but it alternates. That’s the ritual and I’ll always have some tea with some honey and drink as much water as I possibly can which is hard because I am really horrible at drinking water.

GW: With touring taking up the most part of your 2022, how do you keep sane on the road?

RW: Sleep, lots of sleep. I need to make sure I am sleeping and not have any guilt sleeping 'til two in the afternoon and when you’re living most of the day at night, you just gotta sleep…and if I don’t I am fucking crazy and spiralling.

Tour’s cool because even though it looks like there’s no real routine because you’re just travelling and in different cities everyday but it is pretty structured. Every day is the same in a way.

It’s the most routine I have in my life ever… It’s so hard in my profession to have that routine.

GW: What’s on the tour playlist? 

RW: Lots of Liz Phair, Drake, Fiona Apple, Mac Demarco, Soccer Mommy, Brandi Carlisle, The Smile, Lana Del Rey.

GW: Juno was already no-skips, arguably one of the best albums in 2021 and you added these four absolute bangers ('Cake', 'Michael', 'Sugar' and 'Fired') with the release of Juno deluxe. How did these songs come about, were they already in the pipeline before Juno came out?

RW: So I kind of approached it as a these two bookends to the era and that part of my life. I finished them all after Juno was out but ‘Sugar’ and ‘Fired’ were both written before I went into the actual writing process of Juno. ‘Sugar’ and ‘Fired’ are very descriptive of where I was at pre-album, they’re more optimistic and feeling-myself.

‘Michael’ and ‘Cake’ kind of show how the album and the writing process and release process took a toll on me because it was the only thing I was working on for a year and it was in the middle of Covid too. So the whole thing was just this whirlwind and you can hear where I was at mentally after the album was released in those two songs. 

GW: How did that collab with Pinkpantheress on ‘Cake’ come about? 

RW: We’ve just been talking for a really long time…I followed her on Instagram when she had like 2,000 followers: pre-face reveal and only ‘Break It Off’ was out. We’ve kind of been pen pals and when I finally came to London we hung out a fuck tonne of times that trip. I ended up staying in a month longer than I was supposed to. I decided to write here for a while, and got ‘Cake' out of it. 

GW: Did you work with any other people when you were here during that time?

RW: Yeah, I did some stuff with Jacob Collier...I don’t know if any of that will ever see the light of day. Did some jamming with Dora [Jar]. She’s killing it. She’s signed to Island, so we’re label buddies now. 

GW: Are there any artists you would love to collab with? 

RW: I wanna keep working with Porches who I made ‘Michael’ with, I think he’s an incredible artist and I just really like working with him. It’s hard because I could say so many people but you never know if the chemistry will be good. I honestly don’t think about collabs, I just think about my own shit. The best collabs happen organically, like with Still Woozy. I feel like those are the best collabs where it’s just with your homies and you end up in the studio one day with no pressure.

GW: Going back to the Pinkpantheress collab. Obviously, you and her have kind of blown up in similar ways, with a viral moment. How do you feel being grouped in with this new wave of artists, somewhat being labelled as the TikTok generation?

RW: I think that TikTok has a huge, huge hold on the industry in some good ways and some bad ways.

When my songs went off it was so early, the beginning of pandemic. I didn’t even know what TikTok was when it was happening. So it’s interesting that people lump me in there, I guess it makes sense. I don’t consider myself a TikTok artist, whatever that means. I wanna be an album artist. I want people to care about my album.

And of course, if there is a viral moment that happens again then, like, cool but I’m not out here making music for TikTok, that’s like where it turns dark, when people are now intentionally trying to make music for a platform instead of for themselves and as an act of self-expression. For me, it’s such a therapeutic and necessary thing for me to do, to exist that thinking about it in a way that is going to commodify it right off the bat is kind of gross to me. But like TikTok is such a powerful tool and there’s great artists on there aswell. I fucking like TikTok.

GW: If you sonically compare Juno and these latest deluxe tracks to You’re A Dog, your first EP and bigger release - how do you see the evolution of Remi?

RW: I think it’s that sound but more distilled, more experimental and more confidence in Juno. I gave myself more performance and liberty. I created the whole album in isolation, having a lack of external stimulation and even validation in a way, it further enhanced how deep I was able to get into myself and blow it out in that way. It’s all part of the same thread. 

The first EP started off a little bit more moody and kind of RnB with hip-hop elements and [the music] progressively got more and more aggro and in-your-face, which I think is also just a reflection of how I was feeling at the time. I was going through so many changes in my life, I was not chill I was not vibing, I was fucking manic and trying to process all these life changes. 

GW: It’s really fascinating. In the past you’ve said that your songs come about generally out of states of pain, rage and confusion, but the products are so bubbly and colourful without dwelling on these intense feelings so much. How do you manage to transform these emotions? 

RW: I’m not a dweller. I think I feel things really intensely in quick periods and sometimes I act really quickly on those feelings, which is why the songs feel so energetically forward because they’re impulses. A lot of songs in Juno we wrote in one day and finished in four hours. They’re all very specific moments. Pure therapy. 

GW: You predominantly work with the uber-talented Solomonophonic, how did you become such a close collaborative pairing?

RW: We met in high school and were in a band for two years. We wrote a lot of songs back then too and then we both kind of went our separate ways, went to different colleges. He came back into my life in 2018 and he stayed at my house for a week and we just started making music together randomly. 

GW: With it generally just being the two of you in the studio, how do you guys keep pushing each other to deliver so many bangers?

RW: We have a very close relationship, we’re like family. The beauty of our relationship is the honesty we are able to have within collaboration and we have similar taste and where they aren’t similar they are able to just enhance each other. we both brings different things to the table and it just melts beautifully.

It’s interesting, we haven’t really worked together in a significant way since we finished the Juno project just because it was so so much time spent together. We need to just breathe, explore ourselves, come back when we feel ready because it was a really intense project to make.

We were in the studio a couple weeks ago and I'm excited to get back in with him, because I truly love working with him so much.

GW: You have a lot names of people as the titles for your songs - how do you come up with these characters and how do end up as the focal point of your songs? 

RW: I don’t think I know why the name thing has become such a thing. I need to do some self-analysis on it. ‘Michael', when I started writing it, was the first lyric I said and it just turned into that. Michael is a fictional person, based on a lot of truths of a couple different people in my life and is a this symbol of obsession. ‘Sally’ is also based on a person who is not Sally. Sally is just what we had named the track on day one, and we just stuck with it.

I just write about people a lot, as a lot of people do. It’s all very random. It’s all about people and I just write about my relation to people and love and feelings. 

GW: While we’re on names, it would be rude not to. Fuck, Marry, Kill: Anthony Kiedis, Liz, Grumpy Old Man? 

RW: I’m the grumpy old man. So I’ll kill the Grumpy Old Man. I guess, I’ll fuck Anthony Kiedis and I’ll marry Liz. 

GW: The rest of your 2022 is pretty much touring so whats the plan after for you?

RW: I’m making an album, I’m actively writing songs. I’m probably going to spend a couple weeks gathering my thoughts. I don’t even have the brain space, I’m kind of in tour survival mode. I think I’ll just take out a lot of time to reacclimate to society. 

Juno Deluxe is out now.

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More about: remi wolf