For as long as he can remember, Finn Wolfhard has been deeply moved by both listening to and making music. As a little kid, it happened when mainlining his parents’ old Beatles records, and as he matured, it was sparked by endearingly imitating beloved rock bands such as The Replacements and Guided By Voices. For Wolfhard, who began acting at age 10 and went on to star in the Netflix sensation Stranger Things plus two Ghostbusters reboots, these creative outlets “were a way for me to establish control for myself and a little bit of peace. Music for me has always been something that I can control. And while I’m really grateful for acting and for a long time, it really provided me that peace, it’s just a different thing now that I’m an adult and that it’s a career. I still enjoy it a lot, but when I am by myself and get to play guitar and write a song, it’s a different kind of feeling I’m after.”

Now, after several releases with the bands Calpurnia and The Aubreys, Wolfhard unveils his first solo release under his own name, Happy Birthday. A dizzying rush of nine songs, the album grew out of Wolfhard’s personal challenge to pen 50 songs by the end of 2022.

He admits, “I ended up writing a lot of terrible stuff, but a few of those songs I was really proud of went to the Aubreys. I started realizing a general theme in a lot of the other songs involving my identity, anxieties, nostalgia, childhood and loneliness. All of that was a part of a bigger puzzle. I knew I wanted to make a record, but I didn’t know with which songs.”

Enter producer/multi-instrumentalist/Lifeguard member Kai Slater, to whom Wolfhard was introduced by mutual friend and Calprurnia/The Aubreys producer Cadien Lake James. “He said, ‘you’ve got to meet this kid. He’s around your age and he’s just a genius.’ So, I went to see Lifeguard play and I was super inspired by how commanding their presence was and how great they sounded,” Wolfhard recalls. “Kai mentioned his solo act, Sharp Pins, and I then fully fell in love with his record Turtle Rock. It was so lo-fi, but it had such melodic songs that really inspired me. That ended up solving the puzzle, because I realized what would really speak for the album and represent it the best, production-wise, was to record it lo-fi and on tape so that it was raw and handmade.”

Wolfhard proposed coming to Chicago to do exactly that, and he and Slater hit the ground running for sessions in the latter’s home as well as another familiar location. “Lifeguard’s practice space was where I recorded my first Calpurnia album, ” Wolfhard says. “It was such a cool process to go back there now hat I’m not a teenager anymore. I felt like it was the perfect way to do a first solo record because there were no tricks or digital stuff. It was bare-bones – we just used what was in the room.”

That approach makes it feel like we’re getting a true glimpse into Wolfhard’s brain throughout Happy Birthday, which opens with the hazy, 91-second title track and concludes with “Wait,” a song so intimate and homespun that in the background you can hear floorboards creaking as percussionist Eli Schmidt rushes over to turn off a tea kettle he accidentally left boiling.

In between are beguiling songs about decision paralysis (the earworm first single “Choose the latter,” the melody of which was inspired by Alvvays vocalist Molly Rankin), teenage anxiety (the hard-charging “Eat”), completely losing yourself in a relationship, for better or worse (“Objection!”), the aspirational notion of there being “someone for everyone” (“Everytown there’s a darling.” with surreal lyrics seeded by watching nature documentaries) and the most carefree moments of childhood (“Crown,” tracked live with Slater, James, Free Range’s Sofia Jensen and Lifeguard’s Isaac Lowenstein), when consuming a pirate-themed kids meal at a Vancouver restaurant felt like the pinnacle of existence.

Elsewhere, at the urging of friend Faye Webster, Wolfhard enlisted Annie Leeth to adorn the solo electric guitar number “You” with a beautiful, affecting string arrangement. “That was another example of working with someone who made you feel so much cooler, and like such a better musician,” Wolfhard says. “She really ended up making that song shine.”

In what he later saw as a metaphor for the creative catharsis he experienced making Happy Birthday, Wolfhard recalls completing his final vocal take, going out for a victory lap dinner with Slater and Schmidt and promptly collapsing with a high fever. “I was supposed to fly out two days later, but everyday I was just getting sicker and sicker. It turned out that I had pneumonia,” Wolfhard says. “Kai and Eli and his other roommate, Cole, basically housed and took care of me for a week and a half. On the vinyl, there’s a special thanks to them for putting me up afterwards. It was a hell of a way to end a record.”

For Wolfhard, who will be touring Happy Birthday this year, the album is another accomplished step forward in his evolution as a musician, songwriter and citizen of planet Earth. “If I were to walk away and listen to it in 10 years, I think it would feel like the beginning of a specific style and voice,” he says. “It can be interesting being a younger person in any kind of industry, because even though I’ve been acting for a long time, I’m still only 22, and things start to take shape at different times in your life. I hope that when I look back on this record, I’ll be proud of the melodies and the songwriting. I want to be accepting of myself at that time. It was okay that I felt like that and made a record about it and then moved on to new experiences.”

As proven on their strange and beautiful new album Mudglimmer, the looming specter of artistic oblivion pushed The Slaps to lean into their idiosyncrasies: snaking rhythms, complicatedly interlocking guitar riffs, grubby yet alluring poetry, and homespun post-modern Americana sing-alongs all surge with a free-wheeling improvisatory verve informed by free jazz. It’s a stunning DIY comeback story, a doubling-down on avant-garde impulses that pays immediate dividends.

Spontaneous composition and earnest, threadbare folk collide on Mudglimmer. It’s a marvel of influential synthesis, evoking Slint’s comfortability with ominous tension (“Mudglimmer”), Tortoise’s slinky push-pull grooves (“Filthy Sex Manuevers”), Waxahatchee’s slice-of-life Americana gems (“Flip”), elliptical funk-punk a la The Minutemen (“Forward”), minimal grunge-pop in the vein of Sebadoh (“King”) and so much more.

Mudglimmer, in short, rips. Faced with existential threats, The Slaps reconfigured and reenergized — finding purpose, not in reaching for a brass ring, but in becoming fully, unashamedly, their own wonderfully confounding thing.