When Jackson Stell began crafting his new album as Big Wild, he was on a mission to reconnect with the part of himself that first fell in love with music: his inner child. After releasing The Efferusphere, Stell realized he had started taking the creative process too seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it dulled the spark that drew him to music in the first place. To Stell, the inner child represents curiosity and an openness to experience that Stell was feeling estranged from.
To bridge that gap, he imagined a superhero alter ego: Wild Child. “I felt like the more serious my career became, the less I enjoyed making music,” he reflects. “I lost some of that vitality you have as a kid, where you get really excited about things, there’s this exuberance that I wanted to find again.”
Stell channels that exuberance on Wild Child, an experimental, high-energy odyssey that dives deep into the contours of his imagination. Primarily written and produced by Stell alongside a team of collaborators the album strikes a vibrant balance between his mature self and the childlike wonder that fuels his creative output. “Wild Child runs throughout the album and is fighting to stay alive and thriving despite the things the world throws at us,” Stell says. “The album’s about exploring that side of ourselves that we don’t explore much as we age. I think we’re often pushed to repress that part of ourselves when we get older, because it’s deemed silly or irresponsible, but I’ve realized that maturity is about balancing both aspects of ourselves.”
The exploratory nature heard on Wild Child has always guided Stell’s music. Growing up, he discovered his broad musical pallette over the internet. “I ended up with an eclectic taste at a young age.” He started making beats as a teenager, then worked briefly as a composer for an ad agency before he ventured west to Los Angeles, where Big Wild started in earnest.
Following a string of successful self-released singles that helped him build a massive following and land a tour with collaborators Odesza, Big Wild’s debut full-length, Superdream, arrived in 2019 and was followed by 2022’s The Efferusphere and subsequent collaborative album The Efferusphere With Friends.
Throughout Big Wild’s evolution, the project has been rooted in a reverence for nature’s healing power and fueled by Stell’s time spent gardening, hiking, and visiting the ocean. He integrates sustainable practices into his creative work whenever possible and uses his platform to highlight the planet’s beauty and fragility – that ethos carries through on Wild Child, where natural imagery and themes of renewal, resilience, and connection to the earth echo throughout the album’s lyrics and sonic textures.
From the outset, the project has also been defined by diverse musicality and Stell’s multidimensional skills as a producer and vocalist. This creative freedom reaches its fullest expression on Wild Child, an album that captures the uninhibited spirit of rediscovering wonder in both music and life.
Big Wild boldly introduced Wild Child with “You Belong Here” this past April, a symphonic anthem for coming together. Gauzy, atmospheric instrumentation cradles Stell’s falsetto as he sings of dropping out of the digital world and back to the physical. “‘You Belong Here’ is a FIFA World Cup victory song, there’s a lot of camaraderie in it,” he says. “It’s about not getting so wrapped up in the digital world and being more in touch with reality, reality being the space that our bodies actually exist in and the air we breathe, the water we drink, not the things on the screen. It’s encouraging a sense of belonging and togetherness.”
This tension between connection and disconnection weaves throughout the album, surfacing again in the funky “Too Loud,” which features Phantogram. Stell says was inspired by two people trying to connect only to be drowned out by the soundsystem. The easy groove of the track explodes on the bridge, mirroring the song’s lyrical content as Stell’s voice distorts and radiates outward like sonic fallout. “Sarah’s voice was meant for this track, “Stell shares. “Funny enough, I didn’t know what to think when her initial vocal demo had a really similar melody to my own. I had already built up this idea in my head that the melody should be a lot different, that it needed to progress in this specific way, blah, blah, blah. I played Too Loud with her vocals to some trusted ears and everyone loved it. That’s when I slowly realized I was being completely closed-minded and not truly listening. I started to appreciate how incredible she sounded and how she really occupied the imaginary space of the track. Her tone and attitude was the perfect compliment to the production. Sexy and ethereal. Long story short, it was a lesson in letting go of control and not overthinking. I’m really excited for the day when we can play this one together on stage.”
Stell’s collaborative spirit brought key voices into this world, including iDA HAWK on the expansive “Universe” and rock band Twen on the enigmatic single “Anymore.” The latter song emerges based on pure feeling, and Stell can’t pinpoint its meaning, preferring that listeners discover one on their own. This openness mirrors the freewheeling sensibility he brought into the studio, working without inhibition and chasing whatever excited him, unworried whether certain sounds or aesthetics cohered.
The resulting collection of songs is as ambitious as it is surprising. Inspired by 1960s pop music Stell describes as “having a lot of color in it,” Stell produced an album that truly encapsulates the spirit that made him start making music in the first place. You can hear that color from the album’s first moments: the expansive, guitar-driven opener “Farewell” gives way to “Universe,” a sprawling, playful dance track with an enlivening message: “You are an expression of the universe.”
That life-affirming optimism is the purest expression of the Wild Child guiding this album. He surfaces clearly again on the propulsive anthem “Love Any Longer,” a song that commands you “get up, listen with your heart now.” To Stell, the song distills what makes rediscovering your inner child such a rewarding process. Children don’t overthink things–they move with the rhythms of the universe, radically open to experience. “That song is about being fearless with your love when you express it for others. There’s freedom in that vulnerability.”
Wild Child stands as a pure expression of that freedom—vulnerable, colorful, and unafraid. In offering it up to the world, Big Wild invites us all to remember what it feels like to create and connect without fear, to move with the universe’s rhythm rather than against it.
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