Cover story: The rock star hustle of Finn Wolfhard

Lately, Finn Wolfhard has been thinking a good deal about what it means to define his own voice. In the words of the late great Miles Davis, “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” The idea of finding one’s own voice seems especially pertinent for a multi-hyphenate entertainer who has quite literally grown up in front of the world since he was 13. Wolfhard, with the 10-year saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things freshly behind him, is now chipping away at the proverbial marble slab to fine-tune his artistic identity as a solo act.

“I love being a part of a team and an ensemble of people,” he tells Melodic Magazine one July afternoon, calling in from his home recording studio in Vancouver. “But I think for this time in my life where I’m in my early 20s and figuring out who I am as an artist and a person, it’s nice to be able to represent myself and my own point of view.”

By now, Wolfhard’s showbiz accolades are no secret. After getting his start as Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things 10 years ago, Wolfhard quickly racked up an impressive roster of acting credits including a lead role in the 2017 remake of the Stephen King classic It, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and 2023’s Hell of a Summer, which was his directorial debut alongside co-director Billy Bryk. This year, he hosted Saturday Night Live and attended the Met Gala for the first time wearing custom Thom Browne. Yet despite a decade of acting acclaim, it almost feels reductive to define Wolfhard solely by his onscreen credits.

Throughout all of the Hollywood glitz, Wolfhard has followed a musical itch that has ceased to fade. Parlaying his rising star in the TV and film world, his musical pursuits have been documented through the indie rock quartet Calpurnia and the psych-rock-leaning duo The Aubreys. Last summer, Wolfhard released Happy Birthday, a collection of nine lo-fi indie rock tracks that introduced the world to Finn Wolfhard, the solo artist, for the very first time. Now, he’s hitting the road and playing shows this midsummer and fall in support of his sophomore LP Fire From The Hip, which arrived on July 10.

The arrival of Fire From The Hip and his solo music projects as a whole come at a pivotal time in Wolfhard’s career. After a decade of seemingly nonstop hustle between both the acting and music worlds, Wolfhard has finally had the opportunity to take a beat and figure out what he wants to do next. “Especially with the end of Stranger Things, I actually have time to be able to really pursue this and kind of reintroduce myself to the public, because I’ve been in the public eye for such a long time,” Wolfhard says. “It’s nice to be able to show people a new perspective and that I’m also into other stuff, and got other stuff going on that I’m passionate about.”

Wolfhard has described Fire From The Hip as the 35mm contrast to Happy Birthday’s 16mm fuzz, and both the lyrical and thematic content make good on that higher-definition promise. “Everything’s a little more mature,” Wolfhard says of Fire From The Hip. “I think the sound of the record is a bit more mature and I think that there’s sort of an optimism to [it].”

Across the record’s 36-minute run time, Wolfhard details existential worries and growing pains atop a brighter lo-fi landscape. The album also collects references to the pop culture that raised him and his 20-something cohort with a sharp sense of humor. “A lot of the themes in my music are about worry or anxiety or loneliness, and I think that there’s a little more nuance to the lyrics of this record,” he continues. “Even if it’s a sadder-sounding song, there’s still moments of levity or comedy or pop culture references or whatever it is.”

The sound of the Fire From The Hip is notably sunnier than Happy Birthday, but still maintains the lo-fi fuzz. The record cascades between 2010s indie rock flavors and country-hued sounds, taking influence from MJ Lenderman’s warbly and humorous jams and the country-adjacence of The Rolling Stones. Organ, pedal steel guitar, synthesizers, and even some light fiddle lead listeners through the record’s two-pronged story. On the surface, many of the 12 songs tackle the drudgery of early 20s existentialism. “I saw my life inside from your eyes/From your eyes, from your eyes,” Wolfhard sings on the piano-forward cut “Good Morning.” “I felt myself on the bottom of your shoe/Scrape it off, what’s the use?”

But beneath the surface sheen, and upon closer listen, pop culture references and commentary on media consumption abound. “Common Side Effects” details indigestion of the soul due to media consumption through clever lines like “turn on commercials/And take with water/Watch for common side effects.” He describes taking “boomers” (a popular slang term for shrooms) “just to feel like Goerge Clooney,” only to “walk home, exact same pain again.” Ultimately he’s left feeling “drowsy/Aggressive, angry/Difficulty with speaking,” from all of it. On songs like the country-hued “Lights Go Down,” he sings of going to the movies, only to admit that “the weight of the world hit me at previews.” Wolfhard references Nicole Kidman’s infamous AMC trailer (“We come to this place/For the magic/And isn’t it tragic/To see the sausage made,” he sings) and the Avatar franchise (“But no more excuses/Except for Avatar three/I’ll be one with the snoozes”).

Wolfhard also makes reference to the infamous 2009 MTV VMA speech delivered from Kanye West to Taylor Swift, quoting the monologue at the end of album opener “I’ll Let You Finish.” His aim in making the reference isn’t so much for shock value, as it is to underscore pop culture’s hold in the public’s collective consciousness. (Though he does admit, “I kind of did it so I could play it live and people would sing along with it.”)

“We all kind of lived through this crazy event, and then it became super normalized and then it’s just in pop culture forever,” Wolfhard says. “I feel like pop culture is so ingrained into all generations, but with the internet, pop culture references are constantly coming and going, and we all act like it’s normal.”

It should come as no surprise that a 23-year-old might feel a bit digitally burnt out as the pre-Instagram age feels like a distant memory, especially when that 23-year-old has been a public figure for nearly half of his life. Wolfhard comes from “a background of just loving movies, loving stories, and books,” which should come as no surprise given the distinctly analog feel to the recordings and how much cultural ground Fire From The Hip covers.

In continuing to develop his own artistic identity, Wolfhard says putting the LP together was a practice in trusting his instincts. That practice is demonstrated in the writing and production credits he holds across all twelve tracks. “I realized how much I enjoyed recording and producing my own music, and how over the years I’ve really learned a lot from some great mentors about recording and producing, and just kind of doing it yourself,” he says. “Not to say that I didn’t do this with the help of so many of my friends.”

“That was kind of the point of this record, collaborating with all the people that played in my band and having a rotating group of friends coming in and out to be the backing band,” he adds. “But it was really great to kind of be my own boss, I guess.”

The aforementioned Lenderman and Stones influences are present throughout the record, in addition to traces of the breezy rock of Stranger Things co-star and friend Djo (Joe Keery), Wilco, and Johnny Paycheck. In being a lover of rock, Wolfhard says he’s noticed that several of his favorite bands have each had some level of influence from country music. Album closer “The Climb (Not That One)” is perfumed with country accents — the jangle of loose drums. sweeping fiddle, and pedal steel guitar. “Throw away your life/Just to win a fight/Well you lost your mind,” Wolfhard sings like a seasoned country crooner.

“I think that’s kind of where it started,” Wolfhard says of writing “The Climb (Not That One).” “Being like, ‘Okay, can I write my version of a country song?’ Then it kind of bled into all the other rock songs — at least in little ways of trying to make it more cohesive within the [full scope of the] record, [and] have a little glue. So even the rock songs have lap steel or pedal steel, just to bring it back.”

Wolfhard started writing and piecing together several of the songs for Fire From The Hip while working on Happy Birthday, keeping ideas that didn’t land on his debut in his back pocket. “For whatever reason they either didn’t make the cut or I was still figuring them out,” he says. “The songs that ended up being on Happy Birthday were the ones that came more naturally, and the other ones were left over that I knew I wanted to tackle, but wanted to focus on some other songs [first].”

In between recording Happy Birthday in 2023 and releasing it in 2025, Wolfhard spent the “buffer period,” as he calls it, working on his sophomore LP. “Obviously a lot was done when we were recording it, but all the demos were sort of done before, so I was ready to go,” he says. “My label and management were really good about expecting that I wanted this album to come out quicker, which I’m very lucky to have because most bands wait a long time. I don’t know if I’ll ever have this luxury again, honestly, [but] it just was the right time.”

When it came time to take ideas from the page to the booth, Wolfhard chose Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, where acts like Nirvana cut In Utero and Beach House recorded Once Twice Melody. “I just remember seeing pictures a long time ago and thinking it was so cool and weird,” Wolfhard says of the studio. “What’s great about it is that it’s also a house, and I wanted to be able to stay with the band, and [have] it just be about the music nonstop every day. We kind of created our own little world and our own little commune, and that’s why making records is so fun.”

In total, Wolfhard and his creative crew spent just under two weeks recording in Minnesota before decamping back to Wolfhard’s home studio in Vancouver for mixing. “I really wanted the record to feel like you were in the room with the people,” he says. “I think if you’re in a space that has had so many different people come through in so many different iterations, you can really feel it while you’re recording and hopefully while you’re listening to it.”

One of the biggest goals Wolfhard has throughout his creative process is being in service of what’s best for each song. “I think a huge thing that I’m trying to get better at and learn is [that] it’s not what you want to put in the song, it’s what the song needs,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff we recorded for this record that is not on it. That’s just a part of the process of making a record — just trying a bunch of shit and [it] not working, and that’s kind of [with] anything you make.”

“Sometimes it’s not about what you think, it’s about how it will connect to other people,” he adds.

Looking ahead at the rest of his year, Wolfhard says he’s most excited about bringing Fire From The Hip to the stage. “I think there’s just no better feeling than leaving a great rock show, and the energy that it brings you,” he says. “I feel like it’s something that is so communal and connects people, and there’s just something about it that feels very right.”

Wolfhard says he’s hoping to bring the full scope of his album to the stage, to deliver both the emotional weight of the songs while still keeping things light. “The more entertaining and the more fun I have on stage with my friends, the more [fun] people will have out there. I think that generally is true,” he says. “We’re entertaining people, but we’re also trying to have as much fun as possible together and make great-sounding music, so whatever we can do to do that, I think that’s the goal.”