How ‘Survivor,’ Painting & Chili Inspired Remi Wolf’s New Album ‘Mud’

Remi Wolf looks ecstatic on the cover of her third studio album, Mud (out Oct. 9 on Island Records) — despite fully being slathered in dirt. The new project, rooted in Wolf’s signature amalgamation of exuberant alternative pop-rock and ruefully self-aware lyricism, creates a sonic mixture much like the coarse substance itself: “Once you’re out of it, you’re left with all these beautiful minerals and your skin’s all clear,” says Wolf, whose 2024 hit “Cinderella” reached No. 48 on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart and who this year guested on an episode of hit Amazon show Off Campus.

Inspired by the 30-year-old’s love of the grit and freedom of Lucinda Williams’ songwriting, Mud dives head-first into the messy reality of love, loneliness and self-doubt, with a touch of country twang and a surprise assist from John Mayer on the dreamy “Moon So High.” “Making this album felt like a very cleansing process for me,” Wolf adds. “I went into it feeling emotionally very stuck, feeling the s–ttiest I’ve felt for a long time. But I came out of it so cleansed. It was like wiping away the dirt.” Here’s what inspired the album.

Survivor

Wolf suspects the album’s theme came, at least in part, from the reality TV mainstay Survivor she watched while making it. In July, she released the music video for hazy lead single “Twiggy,” which depicts her rolling around alongside Wallows drummer Cole Preston in a thoroughly vetted mud pit. “You can’t just go to Home Depot, buy a bag of dirt and put water in it because it has f–king parasites in it,” she says. So, she researched how Survivor went about creating theirs. “They’re on some crazy s–t. They’re shipping dirt out from the U.S. and fully sifting gallons and gallons of mud and dirt. It’s like spa dirt ­apparently.” Once the adrenaline from the video shoot wore off, Wolf realized her knees were cut up and she was shivering from the cold. She recalls thinking, “ ‘F–k. I don’t think I’d make it on Survivor.’ ”

Oil Pastels

As Wolf was ideating the album’s aesthetics, she went to see a psychic. “The first thing she said to me was, ‘I know you’re depressed, and I know you’re really anxious. What you need to be doing is painting and drawing,’ ” recalls Wolf, who has done both since she was a kid. She started using oil pastels daily for intense six-hour sessions, ripping through pages of notebooks to create the visual language for the album. “It was another version of cleansing and purging this energy that was latent inside me,” she says. One drawing of three “really happy, but kind of demented” inflatable tube men inspired the music video for the single “Bottle” that ultimately featured nine of the figures in a corral. “The song is all about being stuck in place and I was like, ‘These inflatable guys, they’re so free, happy and ­crazy, but they are literally stuck in place,’ ” she says. “I love that juxtaposition.”

Chili

For the past two years, Wolf has been refining her chili recipe. She says it’s the perfect meal for a big group of people making music together in Airbnbs, Wolf’s preferred approach to recording (for Mud, she found spots in Big Bear and Joshua Tree, Calif.). “I would be in charge of every meal because I’m a control freak and I like cooking,” Wolf says. “We would be writing these songs, jamming and I’d be in the kitchen cooking,” she says. “Then they’d hand the mic over to me across the counter, and I’d be singing and then I’d hand it back, stirring my chili all at the same time.” For Wolf’s “incredibly fire recipe,” it’s all about browning the bacon, charring the peppers just right and adding a decent helping of both pinto and kidney beans. “It’s a love language. If people like the chili, I’m like, ‘I love you,’ and you feel it.”