The adage “to fire” or “to shoot from the hip” means to act impulsively, and it is a fitting title for the sophomore album by actor-turned-musician Finn Wolfhard, who, in 2024, wrapped filming Netflix’s Stranger Things, his breakout role. In a 2026 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Wolfhard said, “I spent my childhood standing on marks that other people told me to stand on, and saying lines that other people told me to say. Why wouldn’t I want to make my own stuff?”
Wolfhard’s Fire From the Hip was preceded by 2025’s Happy Birthday, the actor’s announcement of himself as a musician to the public. In hindsight, that debut album feels like a sketch of the sounds its creator would hone on the follow-up: brash, low-fi guitars, acoustic strumming, and rock raucousness.
Fire From the Hip adds country-inspired steel guitars to the mix, a sound that encapsulates Wolfhard’s self-effacing approach to fame: relaxed in the middle of a vortex. “Lights Go Down” satirizes the film industry, using a lackadaisical country ballad as a vessel for biting commentary. Referencing Nicole Kidman’s much-memed AMC commercial, Wolfhard says, “We come to this place for the magic / And isn’t it tragic / To see the sausage get made?”
Wolfhard also acknowledges that, in spite of fame, his perspective on pop culture resembles that of anyone else in his generation. On “I’ll Let You Finish,” he quotes Kanye West‘s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift‘s speech at the 2009 VMAs, which began when West said, “Taylor, Imma let you finish.” Nodding to this canonical mishap lowers the stakes of Wolfhard’s own arrival in the public eye.
Acknowledging the cultural context in which he exists allows Wolfhard to tell authentic stories. In “The Climb (Not That One)”, he recalls falling out with a friend, using Nashville-inspired acoustics to glide through a narrative of conflict with a laid-back attitude. He asks, “Well, you lost your mind / was it worth the climb?” In an outro of soft “oohs,” a fiddle and guitar enhance the relaxed ambiance, proving Wolfhard prefers to downplay deep emotions for comic relief when possible.
In “Good Morning”, he looks to the future: “I saw my door open up / To the outside / With a dog and a wife.” The simple lyricism evokes the wistfulness of someone who recently concluded the defining chapter of their young adulthood, and feels compelled to imagine what might come next. However, even as the future looms, Wolfhard maintains a sense of childlike wonder. In “Crater”, the singer describes children discovering otherworldly phenomena, not unlike the characters of Stranger Things: “We found out / There was a crater beneath his house / It swallowed him whole.”
On the cover of Fire From the Hip, two versions of Wolfhard, dressed in colonial garb, conduct a duel. In a 2026 interview with Hunger magazine, he explains this image: “I think, generally, people are always at odds with themselves.” This is especially true for a famous person, who must juggle a public and private self. Still, Fire From the Hip succeeds by grounding itself in a contemplation of the human experience, where fame is a peripheral, if still noticeable, character.
Having surpassed the age of the character he portrayed on Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard has, perhaps without meaning to, embodied the narrative of the television show that launched his career by growing up in abnormal circumstances. Despite an ambivalence to fame, he displays a preternatural mastery of celebrity’s most essential task: humanizing himself. While, as a title, Fire From the Hip conveys impulsivity, the album’s clever lyrics, intricate production, and irreverent point of view prove that Wolfhard remains undaunted by the powers that be.