When Julia Wolf came up on my radar recently, I initially wasn’t sure where my interest would fall. Would she be just another indie-pop girl playing at being edgy with distressed industrialcore font on her website and a public Tumblr? I didn’t know if I could deal with another one of those, Gen Z’s answer to repurposed teenage nostalgia when they’re barely out of their teens.
Before I listened to even a single track there was an unfounded generalization forming in my brain. Not my finest moment, sure, but there’s a lot of style without substance out there. It’s one thing to have a distinct image; it’s another to back it up. Then I heard “Kill You Off,” the opener from Wolf’s newest album PRESSURE which dropped in May, and I realized I’d been very, very wrong.
If I was tasked with remaking Twilight for the modern era, I’d call Julia Wolf to do the soundtrack. Not only would she have an encyclopedic understanding of the narrative aesthetics—one look at her Instagram proves this—but her music evokes a distinctly blue-tinted feeling that’s hard to misplace. The Twilight soundtrack is already perfect as is and I wouldn’t touch it, but for the sake of this exercise, Julia Wolf knows what’s up.
A 30-year-old songwriter from Queens, NY, Wolf’s music leads lyrics-first. “You’ve been through so much shit, how are you gentle now? / I’m running back into the burning house / For you, for me, for us, for everything,” she sings on “Burning House.” The pungent melancholy that claws its way out of her voice and hangs on every word feels like hands squeezing around a tender throat.
it’s Julia Wolf’s blue-tinted world, we’re just trying to survive in it
Wolf released twin EPs, Julia and Wolf, in 2020, after several singles. Her sound then was firmly indie-pop: slick beats as a backdrop to her rich vocals and vulnerable lyrics, but ultimately, not much more that that. Some acoustic remixes and relatable songwriting for a mid-20s crowd, but if I’d heard of her then I might have written her off. Just another Halsey, maybe. An Ashnikko-flavored Paramore homage, perhaps.
But listening to her early work now, her image was already strong, if a little juvenile. Tales of youthful heartache overlaid with veiled vampire metaphors (“Dracula”) or opaque references to fictional vampires (“Hot Killer”). In 2023, she released her debut LP Good Thing We Stayed, which kept the thread of her previous singles and EPs—thick beats and attitude-laden vocals supported by clever songwriting.
“I was an apparition for most of my youth / Cannonball into the coffin and then wake up for school” Wolf sings on the album opener “Now.” This is a line that reached through time and space to throttle me. If I wasn’t sold on Julia Wolf already, this would have done it.
Still, while her early work is good, not all of it hits me like that. Through 2023 and 2024, she released several more singles, including “Wishbone” and “In My Room” which marked a notable style change. There, she launched headfirst into heavy guitar studded with electronic elements. On “Wishbone” the guitar drudges on underneath while Wolf’s vocals float like a dead body on the surface of a frigid lake.
Heavy metal Caroline polachek vibes to cure what ails you
In April 2025, Julia Wolf released the single “Jennifer’s Body.“ From there, her thinly veiled nostalgic idealism bloomed into a full-on 2009-2012 era aesthetic. These tentative forays—”In My Room,” “Jennifer’s Body,” “Wishbone,” and “Burning House”—take me back to the late-2000s in a way that usually only music from those years can. I’m talking Paramore’s “Decode,” Blue Foundation’s “Eyes On Fire,” and Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years.”
But in May, Wolf dropped the single “Loser” and changed the game. The guitars got heavier, paired with glitchy electronic blips overlaid with her clear, rich voice. It’s a little bit I Disagree-era Poppy instrumentally, but there are hints of Caroline Polachek in the warbling, bending vocals.
Later that month, Wolf’s second LP, PRESSURE, dropped. She had drastically evolved from the indie-pop beats of her early work, sinking fully into the quicksand of fuzzy distortion. The siren song of hardcore guitar is hard to resist. The first two tracks on the album blend into each other with the muted screams of someone buried alive.
I’ll call her heavy metal Caroline Polachek, or dark Olivia Rodrigo. But, really, she’s just Julia Wolf, running through Forks, Washington, on her Instagram reels and visiting all the Twilight landmarks. I’m delighted by the way her music grabs me by the shoulders and shakes until I get whiplash. Until I can see it fitting perfectly in both a Twilight remake or an old Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex episode. Truly, there’s nothing I love more than being proven wrong about a hastily constructed and uninformed generalization.
Photo by Scott Legato/Getty Images
The post Who Is Julia Wolf? The ‘Twilight’ Obsessed Indie-Pop Girly With Heavy Metal Caroline Polachek Vibes appeared first on VICE.
