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 just take whatever we have going here, this energy that we have, a put it into another record.’” It was also The Slaps who persuaded Wolfhard, despite his initial reluctance, to take the production reins himself. “I had experience doing the Aubreys’ stuff – my last band – producing by myself, and going, ‘OK, I feel like I learned a lot.’ And some of the songs even on Happy Birthday I just did by myself, also in my room. But for this I was talking about, ‘Oh, I think maybe I should get a co-producer or something,’ and the guys were like, ‘Dude, just do it. You should just do it! You know what you want. And you wanted to produce the last one by yourself, you should just do it by yourself.’”
While the Vancouver native still calls BC home, Chicago has most definitely become a close second. It was his Stranger Things castmate – and musical star in his own right, via his project Djo – Joe Keery that first connected Finn to the Windy City. “Joe went to school in Chicago, and on set, he was kind of like the cool older brother,” Wolfhard recalls. “I was playing music, and was like, ‘Oh, I want to write songs and stuff,’ and he was like, ‘You should listen to this band Twin Peaks, we’ve played a bunch of shows with them.’ Cadien Lake James of that Chicago indie stalwart soon became a friend and mentor to Wolfhard, connecting him with many of the city’s musical creatives. “Being young, and going to Chicago and seeing how thriving and exciting the music scene is was so eye-opening,” he says. “I went as much as I could, and I made a lot of great friends over there. I’ve been pretty lucky about how ‘open arms’ it is – and just the Midwest scene generally. I feel like Canadians and the Midwest have a similar sensibility, or warmth to them. That I relate to.”
Finn needed all the warmth he could get when he, along with the band and Humphrey, decamped to Minnesota’s famed Pachyderm Studios for two weeks in February to record Fire From The Hip, but from those frozen environs came a remarkably sunny, summer-ready record. While the LP’s sunshine occasionally belies more jaundiced lyrics – see the recent, introspective single “Tunnels” and closer “The Climb (Not That One) – an unabashedly upbeat standout is “Nice To Meet You Again.” All infectious power pop jangle, it’s as immediate as the album gets, and channels the joy of reconnecting with someone after time apart – something Wolfhard, whose past decade has often been nomadic, knows a little about. “The nature of my life is getting to know someone, even someone that you might have romantic feelings toward – but then the nature of my job is leaving,” he explains. “And then, coming back and this idea of every time you see someone, you’re reintroducing yourself. And now, as I come home more often, or get into a community more and start to make friends, there’s a longing to maybe be on the road less. Or just sitting still, and trying to get to know someone, as opposed to keep having to reintroduce myself to people.”
The track is one of several on the record to feature honky-tonk piano and mandolin; steel guitar even appears on other songs – sonic elements that signal a departure from the lo-fi indie box some might have been inclined to put Wolfhard in from earlier records. If Fire From The Hip isn’t country, then “country-adjacent” is fair. “Totally,” he concedes. ”I think, to me this record is ‘country’ in the same way that how rock bands can be influenced by country but they’re not 100% country. A big influence on this record was the first two Wilco records, A.M. and Being There. Or, obviously the Stones, you know, hugely country-inspired, and have a lot of country songs.”
In fact, The Rolling Stones’ classics Exile on Main St. and Beggars Banquet were specifically cited as influential in the April press release announcing Fire From The Hip, and “Tumbling Dice” would not sound out of place next to much of the album. Finn is a student of rock history who’s covered Pixies, Weezer, the Velvet Underground and Mac DeMarco live, appeared with Calpurnia in the video to Weezer’s cover of a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and last year directed an inspired stop-motion video for the George Harrison essential “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” But there is no classic artist more consistently occupying Finn’s current mental bandwidth than alt-rock OGs The Replacements.
A superfan who’s shouted out the band on numerous occasions, wore a vintage Mats t-shirt when he hosted Saturday Night Live earlier this year – a sly nod to the band having been banned by the show following a messy performance 40 years earlier – Wolfhard scored a coup last year in landing the film rights to Trouble Boys, author Bob Mehr’s deeply sourced, moving, warts-and-all 2016 biography of the band. Finn and his father Eric have been working on the screenplay since. “We actually have a call about it later,” he shares. “We’re trying to find a director for it. But yeah, it’s going great. I just want to make something that is authentic to them, as people.” Well aware of the low tolerance for bullsh-t that the Mats and their exacting fans have, when Wolfhard took to Instagram to make official his association with the project, he quoted the droll Paul Westerberg in proclaiming, “Let’s let ’em down!”
“They are sort of the antithesis of a band that would have a biopic, in a lot of ways,” he offers. “And so, trying to tell a story that is authentic to them and also will maybe introduce their music to some people that wouldn’t necessarily know as much Replacements material, I think to me is the goal. And also to make something is true, and not too much of a cliché biopic. So the way me and my dad are approaching this movie is, ‘Well, what would this movie be like if it was a fictional band?’ You know, treating the characters as characters, and not being like, ‘and this is the scene where they have a triumphant…this thing’ but just making it about these characters, and very contained.”
There’s a certain irony in Wolfhard , who’s identified in the past as “pretty straight-edge,” shepherding a film about a band that, let’s say, wasn’t. But the Mats’ famously headstrong, often chaotic and self-sabotaging ways are part of the appeal for Finn. “I am lucky in that I didn’t have, or don’t have, an addictive personality,” he explains. “And also I was terrified, because I was so cognizant of how child actors can end up being, or people that have pressure at a young age, what happens to them if they do start drinking. But I think maybe what I relate to about the Mats is that they were so unafraid to be themselves. And I think they are the most authentic band that ever lived – to the point of their own detriment. I think I relate to the self-destructive nature of people because I think that this idea of failing, and failure, and all the pressure to be a certain way, or do a certain thing, and then going, ‘Well f — k all that, I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do. And if I’m gonna fail, I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna be the one that controls it’ – to me is a very liberating thing. And in the end, kind of a tragedy, but also, there’s something about it that is I would say the most relatable human thing. And to me, it’s why they are the best rock band of all time.”
Back on Fire From The Hip, it’s musical icons of more recent times that are referenced – and quoted verbatim – at the tail end of “I’ll Let You Finish.” Wolfhard wrote the song from the point of view of an older man who underwrites a younger girlfriend’s partying life, is willing to wait around for her and tries to ingratiate himself into her world. As a coup de grâce he concludes by singing the actual words spoken by Taylor Swift and Kanye Swift, when the latter bum rushed the stage at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Finn was not yet seven years old when the viral moment happened, but says he remembers it. “Oh I remember it!” he insists. “I remember it because I have an older brother who, we were watching it together, and my brother – he was probably 12 or 13, so he was definitely the perfect age. I mean I definitely wasn’t old enough to really process what was going on. But I remember watching it in my family friends’ basement with my brother. And just the fact that it happened and then became ingrained into culture. What I find interesting, and maybe why I am a little obsessed with referencing pop culture in lyrics, is there is something funny to me about things happening and then everyone going, ‘Alright, well, you know, that’s just there’ and it becomes normal. Like, ‘we’re never gonna talk about that again’ kind of thing. And just this idea of – I mean I think it’s still safe to say that that’s an insane thing that happened.”
The album serves up twang aplenty on “Maggie” and “Lights Go Down”; “Crater” matches more urgent power pop with Dada lyrics about a guy being swallowed by a sinkhole and a woman swallowing a fork; and “Tunnels” sparkles with New Order touches. There’s also an irresistible post-punk outlier “Follow,” with a chimey guitar that recalls early DIIV and all the moody propulsion you could want from The Strokes or Interpol. It’s one of the oldest on the album, co-written by Wolfhard and Twin Peaks’ Clay Frankel.
“The first demo is like 2019 or something,” he recalls. ”We’ve had it for a long time. Both of us together, we were just like, ‘Why don’t we just do that song?'” The lyrics juxtapose a lonely verse with an explosive, smitten chorus that declares, in slightly obsessive language, “No matter where you are I’ll follow.” “To me, it’s the duality of these two things,” Finn says. “The verses being more about too afraid to go out, too afraid to maybe follow this person who you really have feelings for, but then just feeling sorry for yourself, and like ‘I’m not gonna go out.’ But then also this idea of the explosive nature of how things can change so fast. How one night you can be feeling really down about things, and then something happens, and you end up feeling like you could follow this person to the ends of the earth. It’s this idea between second-guessing yourself about feelings you have, and lust versus actual love, and trying to find something pure.”
There is a purity of purpose to so much of what Wolfhard takes on creatively. Happy Birthday dropped last summer, when the final season of Stranger Things and all the hoopla and emotion surrounding it was still to come. When the series did end, it did so gracefully – there were opinions, of course, but its conclusion compares favorably, in hindsight, to the divisiveness of finales like Euphoria. “It’s hard to end a show,” Wolfhard admits. “But I think we landed the plane, in the end.” And with the plane fully landed, more than ever, he can plot his own course. For this year, anyway, that means making Fire From The Hip, its upcoming sold-out North American tour and music in general the priority. “Specifically for this year, I have had to either turn stuff down or at least put stuff on hold because I am putting music first,” he says, adding that when he does act, he doesn’t have any interest in equaling, “topping” or replicating what he has done in the past, be it Stranger Things or the other ‘80s-set role that put him on the map, Richie Tozier in 2017’s It.
“I’ve kind of been playing the same character for 10 years. If I am gonna act, I want to do something that is really super different,” Wolfhard says. While he does plan to do one movie this year – a project he and a friend have been developing “for a long time” and which they hope to have out next year – he’s concluded that bigger isn’t always better. “The idea is music, right now, is really the thing that I’m pursuing. And if I’m gonna act, then I really want it to be the right thing, and something that I really connect with personally. I am lucky that now I’ve got a group of friends that now I’m writing and making stuff with,” he says. “If it’s an awesome director, I don’t care if it’s a tiny f–king part, I just want to work with really cool people. I’m not really concerned with doing the ‘biggest’ thing or whatever. I’m really lucky that I had those experiences, and that I was a part of these huge franchises. I’m more into the music — and if I am acting, maybe being in something a bit smaller.”
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