Last month, Remi Wolf’s electrifying debut album ‘Juno’ saw the 25-year-old talking candidly about sobriety, turbulent mental health, lust and social anxiety. “Sometimes I’ll write songs out of a need to expel whatever the fuck is going on inside,” she told NME recently as she made her cover debut. “But the most therapeutic part for me is performance.” And tonight at London’s Moth Club, Wolf and her fanbase (lovingly nicknamed the Rem Jobs) purge their demons with a euphoric 75-minute set.
Throughout, Wolf’s music is impossible to pigeonhole. Tonight, over the course of a 17-song set, the Californian artist dabbles in punk, pop, indie, funk and dance – often at the same time. Vocally as well, she’s as comfortable rapping about fast food orgies (‘Quiet On Set) as she is belting out lyrics about love (‘Woo!’). Hell, she almost scats during ‘Sexy Villain’ but there’s no time to step back and dissect exactly what’s going on. Whatever you want to call it, Wolf makes party music and from the second she hits the stage and launches into the woozy ‘Liquor Store’, every moment is cause for celebration.
There’s the glitching electro bounce of ‘WYD’, the sunny swagger of ‘Sauce’ and impressive covers of both Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ and MGMT’s ‘Electric Feel’. ‘Liz’ is the closest Wolf gets to a ballad but even that goes in hard. “This is one of the craziest shows we’ve played,” she says before asking the crowd who isn’t having fun? It’s the only time Moth Club falls silent.
Midway through the set, Wolf briefly takes up a residency behind the drum kit, launching into a furious Rage Against The Machine inspired drum and bass jam while her ousted drummer leads the room in a series of chanted life lessons (“It’s not ok to get drunk at work”). It’s chaotic, unexpected and a whole lot of fun – as is Wolf’s questionable British accent that she tries on time and time again.
“I used to have a lot of social anxiety. I would go to a party and feel like I was getting attacked by weird laser beams of energy. But also, I was always really horny. I didn’t really know what to do with myself so I wrote a song about it,” she tells the room before ‘Guerrilla’, a groove-led song that explodes with fist-pumping energy on more than one occasion. Elsewhere she strolls through the crowd while singing ‘Quiet On Set’ before an extended ‘Photo ID’ sees her dancing about the stage without a care in the world
By the time Wolf finally leaves the stage, she’s given the glittery sweatbox her all. The crowd seems just as spent. Whatever emotions were troubling them before have now been exorcised, all thanks to Remi Wolf’s cathartic, feel-good party.
Remi Wolf played:
‘Liquor Store’
Recommended
‘Grumpy Old Man’
‘WYD’
‘Sauce’
‘Monte Carlo’
‘Liz’
‘Crazy’ (Gnarls Barkley cover)
‘Electric Feel’ (MGMT cover)
‘Sexy Villain’
‘Hello, Hello, Hello’
‘Drum Jam’
‘Guerrilla’
‘Woo!’
‘Quiet On Set’
‘Disco Man’
‘Photo ID’
‘Shawty’