Rising alt. star Julia Wolf is leading the pack

Don’t cage Julia Wolf in with your expectations or labels. She’ll just push back. “As soon as I start feeling boxed into one thing, I immediately get this itch of having to get out of it,” she explains. “I don’t feel the need to constantly stay the same. I will switch it up and make what feels authentic to me at the current time always.”

True to her nature, when it came to writing her second album PRESSURE – released in May – her emotions pulled her away from the propulsive pop of 2023’s Good Thing We Stayed towards a more fluid sound dominated by warm, tender guitar riffs. Even within that space, she’s still chameleonic, gliding between sounds as varied as the techy guitar pop of Kill You Off, the tumultuous Pearl (complete with sneak-attack heaviness in its back half) and the gritty, self-effacing Loser.

“I knew I wanted the sound to be heavy and alternative leaning, but I wanted it to push further past what was expected of me,” she says. “It’s literally just all my favourite things thrown together in a way that feels cool to me.”

Julia has a way of emoting that is candid and undiluted, but there’s a sense her feelings cannot be pared back or held in, even when the truth reads messily. ‘I stalk myself on the Internet just to see what you’ll find,’ she sings on viral hit In My Room.

“The older I get the more I can’t hide the parts of myself I really tried to cover up in the past,” she admits. “I’m just too sensitive and self-conscious on a daily basis where now it bleeds into my subject matter. It’s all over the album because it’s all over my brain. I can’t help it.”

She’s captured herself at a particularly vulnerable moment, too. “I think falling in love for the first time kind of dredged up every insecurity I’ve ever known to the point where it felt unbearable not writing it down,” she says. Indeed, on Jennifer’s Body, she constructs a girl in her imagination who her boyfriend might want more than her – ‘He says my body is heaven / As I picture her underneath him.’

Even when she was singing covers in restaurants and playing open mic nights six nights a week, an intuitive spark told her the work wasn’t for nothing. Now, in front of more eyes than ever, she recently completed a stint opening for PVRIS across the UK and Europe, and a word-of-mouth buzz swirled around 2000trees on the day she was playing. Her album title might be a loud declaration of the forces she’s up against, but despite the anxiety it causes, she will stare them in the face.

“I don’t cope very well with [the pressure] in all honesty – if anything, it’s become a bit worse as now more eyes are on me,” Julia admits. “At the same time, it’s forced me to be more honest and trust my gut way more. I realise so many of these industry folks have zero clue what works and what doesn’t and all the ones who passed on me last year are knocking at my door now.

“That kind of pressure just helps motivate me at the end of the day, and when it gets to my head, it gives me more to write about.”

PRESSURE is out now.

Read this next:

• Mothica: “When you’ve been through so much and gone through so many rock bottoms, you start to think, ‘Nothing can hurt me now’”
• YUNGBLUD: “The way rock survives, thrives, prospers and gets bigger is if we all stick together”
• PVRIS: “Art makes people happy, and it’s a connecting tool, and it can be used politically. I’m trying to remember that”