Posted by Liz and John Attaway, 8/7/25
ANNOUNCES THE AUGUST 29 RELEASE OF NEW ALBUM WILD CHILD VIA GIANT MUSIC
SHARES NEW SINGLE “TOO LOUD (FEAT. PHANTOGRAM)”
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North American Tour This Fall On-Sale Now: Dates Include Brooklyn On September 12 And Los Angeles On October 4
$1 From Every Ticket Sold To Benefit Portland’s Ethos Center
Big Wild (aka Jackson Stell) is excited to announce the release of his bold and vibrant new album Wild Child, out August 29 via Giant Music. The album is Stell’s most dynamic and personal project to date. After 2022’s The Efferusphere, he found himself craving the curiosity and joy that first drew him to music. That search led him to reconnect with his “inner child”—a creative alter ego he calls Wild Child, sparking a sonic journey that’s equal parts playful, fearless, and emotionally resonant. The LP finds him trading electronic foundations for a richer palette that draws from indie-pop, psychedelic rock, and the colorful textures of ’60s music. These songs pulse with live instrumentation and embrace the kind of playful unpredictability that comes from creating without constraints.
Primarily written and produced by Stell with a close-knit group of collaborators, Wild Child explores themes of renewal, resilience, and connection to the earth that echo throughout the album’s lyrics and sonic textures.
Alongside today’s announcement, Big Wild has also revealed the funky and reflective new single, “Too Loud (feat Phantogram).” The song premiered via Flood Magazine who say, “Big Wild has served as a form of musical escapism for the electronic project’s creator Jackson Stell for a decade now, but with his newly announced third LP Wild Child, the songwriter fully frees himself from his adult hangups. With a pivot to analog instruments and a dismissal of his ego, these 13 tracks signal a new chapter for the artist most easily discernible by the tonal shift from post-disco synths to indie-pop.” Stell told them:
“I first made the demo while I was making The Efferusphere. I can’t really pinpoint inspiration besides following what excites me. I try to trust that feeling and not overthink it. As simple as the demo sounded, there was something that consistently grabbed me when I listened back. It was sexy and ethereal. I was hung up on the second verse and the lyrics until I was connected with Sarah from Phantogram. Her voice was perfect and was the last big piece to the puzzle. She smashed it and my team and I were so stoked to work with her. I remember the head of the label, Nate Albert, telling me the song needed to be finished in a week to make it to vinyl. It’s such a cliche when finishing an album, but this truly was one of those songs submitted in the final hour in a mad hellish dash.”
On working with Phantogram, Stell further states, “Sarah’s voice was meant for this track, she really occupied the imaginary space of the track. Her tone and attitude was the perfect compliment to the production. Sexy and ethereal. I’m really excited for the day when we can play this one together on stage.”
Phantogram’s Sarah Barthel shares: “This song makes me want to roll the windows down and turn the volume all the way up. Working with Jackson has been such a blast and we can’t wait to dance with you to this soon.”
This Fall Big Wild will embark on his “Wild Child Tour” of North America with dates kicking off on September 4 at Marathon Music Works in Nashville, TN. The tour makes stops at the Mission Ballroom in Denver, CO on September 27, and at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on October 4 before its conclusion on October 11 in Troutdale, OR. A $1 donation from every ticket sold on the “Wild Child Tour” will go to Portland’s Ethos Music Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides free and sliding scale music lessons, ensembles, summer camps, and community outreach to thousands of students across Oregon each year. All dates are listed below and tickets are available here.
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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.
“The Wild Child Tour”
9/4 – Marathon Music Works – Nashville, TN
9/5 – The Eastern – Atlanta, GA
9/6 – The Fillmore – Charlotte, NC
9/8 – The National – Richmond, VA
9/9 – Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA
9/11 – Echostage – Washington, DC
9/12 – Avant Gardner – Brooklyn, NY
9/13 – Citizens House of Blues – Boston, MA
9/15 – State Theatre – Portland, ME
9/16 – The Danforth Music Hall – Toronto, ON
9/18 – Royal Oak Music Theatre – Detroit, MI
9/19 – The Salt Shed – Chicago, IL
9/20 – The Sylvee – Madison, WI
9/23 – First Avenue – Minneapolis, MN
9/24 – The Truman – Kansas City, MO
9/26 – Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater – Vail, CO
9/27 – Mission Ballroom – Denver, CO
9/30 – Rockwell at The Complex – Salt Lake City, UT
10/2 – Channel 24 – Sacramento, CA
10/3 – The Greek Theatre – Berkeley, CA
10/4 – The Wiltern – Los Angeles, CA
10/7 – Knitting Factory Concert House – Boise, ID
10/9 – Showbox SoDo – Seattle, WA
10/11 – Edgefield Concerts on the Lawn – Portland, OR
