Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult experiences with the celebrity lifestyle, having been thrust in the cultural spotlight at just fourteen years old as one of the stars of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Whatever your reaction to this audacious choice, Wolfhard’s intertwining of contemporary pop culture references with a Pavement-adjacent sonic palette signals an exciting step in his musical career. Although he technically got his start leading groups like Calpurnia and The Aubreys, his brief but surprisingly solid solo debut, last year’s Happy Birthday, teased a promising glimpse into his individual artistic vision. Alongside his co-producer Kai Slater, Wolfhard imbued abstract images and quiet confessions about his anxieties growing up famous with raw, lo-fi garage rock and distorted power pop. His follow-up, Fire from the Hip, scales up his production to an even higher professional level, streamlining the fuzzy, jazzy energy that defined Happy Birthday into a more focused yet just as stylish and playful album.
On an initial listen, Fire from the Hip does feel a bit familiar, taking a clear page out of other classic and current rock groups and artists—Sharp Pins, Alex G, and Elliott Smith come to mind, in addition to Pavement—but Wolfhard’s confident and zestful presentation wisely avoids derivative, monotonous pastiche. Similar to “I’ll Let You Finish,” “Lights Go Down” takes a zeitgeisty catchphrase—in this case Nicole Kidman’s iconic-turned-overused AMC speech—and turns it into a silly yet beguiling commentary on the disorienting experience of watching movies as an actor (“We come to this place / For the magic / And isn’t it tragic / To see the sausage made”). Elsewhere, he invokes celebrities for amusing comic detours, talking about taking “boomers” to feel like George Clooney (“Common Side Effects”) and reading to kids like George W. Bush (“Maggie”).
Aside from its oddball sense of humor, Fire from the Hip infuses Wolfhard’s personal anecdotes of fame and young adulthood with tasteful, robust instrumentation, from the very pretty country-folk strings on “Lights Go Down” and closer “The Climb (Not That One)” to the jangly jam band vibe of “Nice to Meet You Again” and the simple yet effective piano and organ riffs on “Good Morning.” You could definitely sense the influence of his late-nineties/early-aughts forebears on those tunes and other tracks like the ensemble-led “Follow” or the warm, acoustic-driven “Maggie.”
Maybe the album lacks some of the emotional honesty of those forebears, occasionally prioritizing goofy, clever wordplay over a clear, tangible narrative, but Wolfhard’s personalized take on indie-rock formulas of yore is refreshing in its looseness. You get the sense that something even stronger and more vulnerable from him is waiting in the wings. Even though being in the limelight has proven difficult, Wolfhard’s many years of performing and fine-tuning his craft are clearly starting to pay off. [Night Shift]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress, and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
