“Dear God, I’m covered in mud.”

Indeed, Remi Wolf’s newest album is saturated in her amorphous, genre-bending signature sound. The Palo Alto-raised artist originally found her calling in competitive skiing, but switched over to music in high school, appearing on season 13 of American Idol. This hungry energy carries over into her music career, where she has honed a unique sound that cannot be contained in one category or described without a hyphen. Her signature biting lyrics, energizing belts, sharp production, and hard-to-pin-down style shine in her new album, “Mud,” released on Oct. 9.

Throughout Wolf’s discography, her lyrics have remained specific and strange, quickly arriving at the point of what she’s trying to say. She notes tiny details of her experiences and makes wild metaphors like, “I’m a feral cat I’m licking up the milk at your door,” making her lyrics relatable yet creative and exciting. This tension between the nonsensical (“I got violence on my violets”) and the relatable (“I’m doing on-and-off pilates / Like a middle-aged soccer mommy”) carries through into Wolf’s compositional style, where she blends rap, alternative, R&B, funk, and pop themes together into self-assured sonic concoctions. Wolf’s vocal capabilities are also impressive; at times her voice is soft and clear, at others raw and rough and screaming, and sometimes powerfully belting. The key word with Wolf is range.

The first song on “Mud,” titled “Bottle,” is about Wolf’s relationship with substances, a theme she has explored in the past with songs like “Liquor Store” and “Alone in Miami.” In a recent interview on the Zach Sang show, Wolf reflected on her tendency to stay sober while writing an album and return to drinking while on tour. The chorus’s catchy refrain “I’m going off and on and off again / on and off and on again” describes this recurring struggle against alcohol addiction.

The “Bottle” music video features Wolf idling around a beach and frantically running around in a giant clear bubble. Despite the serious subject of the song, the sound and video of “Bottle” are catchy, fun, and lighthearted. The same can be said for “Wine Drunk” and “Champagne,” which explore Wolf’s proclivity for possessive, addictive relationships: “I’m always waiting here for someone to choke me down like cheap champagne.” Wolf’s talents as a lyricist shine as she colors candid confession with striking analogies.

In “Mud,” Wolf often places musical and thematic contradictions beside each other, energizing the album. Songs like “Twiggy” and “Covered in Mud” also explore toxic relationships through bright and catchy tunes, but devolve at the end into raw, angry cacophonies of frustration and hurt. “Covered in Mud” begins with jittery drums and atmospheric synthesizers that feel striking in the Southern-accented confessional. Through these clashing elements, Wolf gives her album an air of innovation that keeps the listener intrigued.

In other songs, Wolf shows that she understands when to match the tone of the song to its subject. “Burn Me Blue” opens with a nostalgic, swinging guitar line that signals the unapologetically in love tone of the song. “Moon So High” and “I Won’t Cry” are the most devastatingly heartsick songs on the album with their sad, slow beats. “Guess” is guitar-forward and soft, reflecting the small disappointments of the deteriorating relationship that it describes.

In “Jamie,” Wolf provides the album with its requisite experimental R&B song, as in “Liz” for the 2021 album “Juno” and “When I Thought Of You” for the 2024 album “Big Ideas.” Here too, Wolf uses strange analogies and specific observations to dreamily describe yet another unsatisfying relationship. This time however, the atmospheric and sour sound of the composition feeds into its subject, drawing the listener in not only lyrically but also sonically.

Wolf delivers on all the fronts she is known for. “I Won’t Cry” and “Yellow Rose” are the most vocally stunning songs on the album, with Wolf’s belting prowess and vocal range beautifully describing the desperate disappointment of heartbreak. Throughout the album, the lyrics are honest, intriguing, and particular. She explores a wide range of genres as she recapitulates the intricacies of heartsickness and addiction over and over again. Overall, “Mud” is a commendable iteration of Wolf’s unique sound, a treat for her fans and an interesting listen for newcomers.