Finn Wolfhard Talks Wilco & the Stones Influencing His New Album – And The Replacements Biopic He’s Cowriting
Categoria: Musica
The musician-actor's second solo album (his first since the Stranger Things finale) dropped ahead of his sold-out North American tour.
Por Billboard | 16/07/2026
On New Year’s Day, millions worldwide tuned in to watch, through many a tear-filled eye, Mike Wheeler of Hawkins, Indiana, put his D&D book on the shelf, and bring to a close one of the greatest cross-generational pop culture phenomena of this century, Stranger Things. For Finn Wolfhard — who for all his adolescence and young adulthood embodied that often unsung, increasingly gangly, Paladin-styled hero in the wildly popular series — it was time. It also meant more time to devote to music, Wolfhard’s concurrent passion, along with acting, writing and directing. That career has already had several manifestations: the Vancouver-based alt band Calpurnia; its offshoot project with Malcolm Craig, The Aubreys; and a solo chapter that launched last year with Happy Birthday, the most affecting distillation yet of a charming, lo-fi garage and punk sound that has come to be Wolfhard’s signature. Now he’s back with the new Fire From The Hip, a second solo LP that finds Finn making his biggest sonic leap yet: brighter, more expansively produced and leaning into classic rock and country flavors like never before. Packed with immediate melodies and explosive hooks, it’s a crowd-pleaser, swinging for new, potentially more mainstream fences, and hopefully bringing in new devotees. “As a 23-year-old, I’m not gonna sit here and say that I have figured anything out, in any way,” Wolfhard tells Billboard over Zoom, a few days before Fire From The Hip ’s release and in the run-up to the July 17 launch of his Common Side Effects tour. “But as far as recording music, you do learn something every time you play, and you learn from other people, and you get different perspectives. Your early twenties, I feel, are for figuring out who you are, what kind of artist you want to be seen as, and how you want to express yourself. So I feel like this record is a good representation of all the influences and knowledge I’ve picked up over the last eight years of recording. I would say it’s definitely a natural evolution.” It also marked a new approach to recording, on a couple of fronts. While Happy Birthday was very much a collaborative “baby” between Wolfhard and Kai Slater, of Chicago’s Lifeguard, Fire From The Hip was produced by Wolfhard himself, with a team of other Chicagoans: engineer Andrew Humphrey and Rand Kelley, Ramsey Bell, Josh Resing and Garrett Spoelhof of The Slaps, who since last summer have doubled as Wolfhard’s live band. The dynamic they developed on the road in 2025, playing Happy Birthday as well as some of the songs from Fire From The Hip (which Wolfhard had written more than a year earlier), grew into an organic collaboration. “It came together in a fun, seamless and fast way,” Finn explains. “We had such an amazing time touring, and really a good thing going where we were in soundcheck running these new songs, trying them out. ‘Cause those guys had such great ideas about different parts and different arrangements. So I just said, ‘Let’s ju