Finn Wolfhard takes nothing for granted

Finn Wolfhard might be working too hard. In the last four hundred days, he starred in Crash Land, which premiered at SXSW, wrapped up his ten-year run in Stranger Things, and released his sentimental, exciting debut album, Happy Birthday. Which means that, if you do the math, it all adds up to one truth: Wolfhard has been very busy. In fact, I think that he is doing entirely more than he needs to. But I also think that he might like it that way, because he’s adding another LP to his resumé: Fire from the Hip, due out this Friday. 

I am the umpteenth participant in a parade of a zillion journalists Wolfhard is talking to today through the soulless squares of a Zoom meeting room. He appears to have been locked away in some nondescript, windowless basement for these interviews, and he looks tired. But he’s never anything but nice and thoughtful, if not a tad anxious. 

This is a theme that appears on Fire from the Hip in the form of its ugly emotional flip-side: Wolfhard is (sometimes) really insecure. On the cover, two Wolfhards prepare for an old-timey duel. One Finn points his gun straight ahead, his body so pin-straight he looks like he has preemptive rigor mortis. The other Finn wavers, his muzzle to the sky and one foot backing out of frame. “It’s about the way I work with impulses,” Wolfhard explains. “There’s one impulse that’s like, ‘I’m gonna go and fucking make this record and go on tour with my friends.’ And there’s other impulses: ‘I’m really scared about this thing’; ‘I’m not going to go out’; ‘I feel really anxious in this social situation.’ They’re both the same part of your brain, so it’s almost like you’re two different people.” 

It was a big leap of faith for Wolfhard to produce this album on his own. He’s been in bands for almost as long as he’s been famous, and he started playing music well before that. Ever the overachiever, he began playing piano at four before starting Calpurnia as a teenager. Then emerged The Aubreys, a two-piece with his Calpurnia bandmate Malcolm Craig that’s still technically going but hasn’t shared new music in years. 2025 marked Wolfhard’s first foray into solo material, as he co-produced his debut album with Kai Slater of Sharp Pins and Lifeguard. “Anything I was unsure about, I’d defer to [Slater],” Wolfhard recalls.

For Fire from the Hip, Wolfhard’s band encouraged him to produce it alone. “It gave me an opportunity to be deliberate,” he admits. “Knowing when to shut up and allowing someone to play a part in the way that they wanted to play it, you know, and then knowing when to speak up and say, ‘I don’t think this works.’” He grins sheepishly; it seems like telling people “no” isn’t really in his wheelhouse. Wolfhard’s solo production makes for an album that’s brash and lively, with a wider, more exploratory sound. It’s looser than Happy Birthday, tongue-in-cheek and self-referential, with plenty of room for his collaborators to leave their own marks. 

Like Wolfhard, I am twenty-three. Unlike Wolfhard, I am not an international celebrity: it will be a joyous day when the bodega guy learns to differentiate me from the other brunette who lives in my apartment. But the age thing, honestly, seems more salient in our conversation. Wolfhard, like any twenty-something in any era, is full of grand convictions and vertiginous fears. Fire from the Hip is his album about growing up, about the part of metamorphosis when you’re half-butterfly and half-slimy, hairy caterpillar. It’s about fear: that you might stay that way forever, or that, even if you knew you might, you still wouldn’t want to go back. “I don’t know if literally anyone would relate to anything that I’m saying, but I’m gonna try anyway,” Wolfhard laughs. I rejoin, with near-cartoonish conviction, that the feelings he’s wringing out on the album are very, very universal, at least for anyone born during or after the younger Bush’s presidency. “Great,” he says, face softening a little. “That’s what we want.” 

Wolfhard may be young, but he’s got a nostalgic soul. And it seeps into his music, which is inflected with buzzy nineties country-rock twang and roiling seventies guitars, and into his interactions with others, punctuated by big, emotive eyes and a seriousness that ages him. Maybe this is a byproduct of coming of age in the faux-eighties living rooms on the Stranger Things set, but I don’t think so. He just seems like someone with a lot of big emotions and an even bigger desire to like and be liked. He enjoys older records because “you can feel the fingerprints of people in the recording,” the flubs and curses and little in-studio asides they include at the end of songs. (Fire from the Hip is replete with these; many tracks are girded by Wolfhard’s voice. It certainly makes the record feel busy.) “I feel like you get away with a lot of stuff, and there’s also just a sweetness to nostalgia that lends itself to I think the way that I like to write songs,” he says of dipping into an older sound. “I like having a sense of optimism and melancholy to my music, and I like to be able to have a production style that lends itself to that.”

It’s true, too, that having a childhood like Wolfhard’s both ages you at hyperspeed and traps you like a fossil in amber. He’s never felt quite like he fit in with his peers. “The only way I connected with people, and made friends, is through music and pop culture and movies, you know, being creative,” he expands. “I didn’t have much going for me, other than the stuff I was interested in. I’m lucky that I was able to be successful in the only way I knew how to relate to other people.”

“And through that,” he continues, “I’ve been able to find ways to say how I feel, share my perspective, and maybe not feel as much like an outsider. It’s a very public job, me being an actor at a young age. I never really got that feeling away from me, of feeling like an outsider, whereas I feel like [with] music, when everyone feels it and understands it and listens to it, it kind of feels like everyone is a little equal.” The method isn’t foolproof: in elementary school, way before Yesterday came out, Wolfhard tried to pass off Beatles songs as his own to impress his classmates. “No one cared,” he smirks, though the image is sort of heartbreaking. Loneliness is a common theme on Fire from the Hip, wrapping songs like “Maggie,” “Follow,” and “Crater” in its gauzy grip. 

Wolfhard is shy, careful, considered, as though he’s a bit too aware of the way his words might land. He came into his own at School of Rock camps in his native Vancouver, graduating from those kiddie ensembles to the bands he fronted in his teenage years. On the Stranger Things set, he’d act all day, do his schooling in his trailer, and return to watch the directors at work. He’d listen raptly as Joe Keery, who was also diverting some of his focus to a solo music career, showed him Twin Peaks, a band that would become his favorite. (Two of its former members, Cadien Lake James and Clay Frankel, helped out on Fire from the Hip; the sweet, Whitney-esque song he lets them shine on, “Nice To Meet You Again,” is one of the album’s highlights.) Though Wolfhard is not a complainer, it had to be rough going at times; on “Lights Go Down,” he hints at the less forgiving elements of the acting life, singing, “We come to this place for the magic / And isn’t it tragic to see the sausage made?” 

Still, the sausage has its benefits. Wolfhard laughs, remembering a hapless reporter who asked him if Stranger Things held him back from pursuing his music career. “First of all, I was twelve,” he clarifies. “The show was all-encompassing, and also, if I hadn’t been in it, I would have been in school! It’s not like, ‘Man, if I wasn’t in Stranger Things, shit, I would have been on tour!’” Being a multidisciplinarian has worked out rather well for Wolfhard thus far. He recently directed a posthumous music video for George Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” Next year, he’ll play a part in Bong Joon Ho’s animated feature debut Ally, and he’s currently working on a Replacements biopic with his father Eric. “I don’t know if it’ll bite me in the ass in some way when I’m older, but it seems to be working well, blending all the stuff, which is nice,” he grins. I think Finn Wolfhard is going to be just fine. 

Fire from the Hip is out July 10 on Night Shift.

Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.

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