After representing the U.S. for two years at the Youth Olympic Games as a skier, making a high-school run at American Idol, and then taking a different path to fame with a four-year stay at USC's Thorton School of Music,
Remi Wolf
landed on the pop scene with a highly stylized, neon-colored, D.I.Y.- influenced kitchen-sink clatter. She cracked the Billboard alternative airplay and digital songs charts in 2020 with the flexatone-featuring single "Hello Hello Hello" before making her full-length
Island Records
debut a year later with the extroverted, dizzyingly genre-inclusive
Juno
. That record was produced by
Solomonophonic
(
Jared Solomon
). After three years that included tours with
Lorde
,
Paramore
, and
Olivia Rodrigo
and sessions at Diamond Mine Recording and Electric Lady Studios in New York with
Wolf
returns with the like-minded
Big Ideas
. It's named for high-concept songs about subjects like love, lust, fantasy, reality, giddy highs, and lowly lows. Symbolic of those highs and lows while also engaging with the idea of being your own fairy godmother, the funky, '70s-suffused "Cinderella" opens the album with a deep groove, referee whistle, and horns, as
slinks across the dancefloor to lyrics like "Baby girl, won't you dry your eyes/Don't stress, because you're doing it right." Parts reggae and angsty pop punk, "Wave" vents rather than uplifts, and songs like "Pitiful" and the art-punky "Kangaroo" are fizzy club-rock entries with crunchy as well as sparkling textures and song-specific vocal deliveries. Speaking of affected vocals, she employs Auto-Tune among other tricks on the emo-tinged "When I Thought of You," and "Just the Start" is a mostly unprocessed jokey folk song. Candid as ever throughout these twists and turns, the album arguably hits a climax of contrasts with the pairing of "Toro" and "Alone in Miami," two songs written with
Ethan Gruska
and
Jack Demeo
, one about having sex in a hotel room and the other about feeling alone in someone's company. While
could be accused of being uneven, filler is a matter of personal genre preference here, left turns that are fun or even funny dominate, and with a closer like the helium-voiced disco entry "Slay Bitch," any remaining scolds should be few and far between. ~ Marcy Donelson