Julia Wolf has been feeling the pressure. So much so that the emotive, expressive, genre-fluid singer-songwriter has named her new sophomore album exactly that. “It’s called Pressure for a reason,” says the Long Island-born, Los Angeles-based Wolf, whose instinctive pop sensibilities have a way of shining through even her darkest sonic inclinations, attracting a steady stream of fans and industry followers. But while lesser artists might buckle under the weight, Wolf feels it differently: “Pressure is what sets me free,” she says. Indeed, instead of polishing her sound in the wake of 2023’s trap-pop-inflected breakthrough, Good Thing We Stayed, Wolf goes rawer, heavier, and grittier on Pressure, swan-diving through emo and shoegaze, metallic textures and shredded electronics, and putting her evocative Evanescence-inspired vocals to work over an always shifting soundscape of feelings-first music. Pressure is an enrapturing journey through dualities — a celebration of dark meets light, of piercing pain that leads to relief and catharsis.
The album’s cover captures this contrast, showing a woman serenely dangling from a lush tree by body-suspension hooks. “It just perfectly sums up the kind of pressure that I’m feeling,” says Wolf. “There’s a little blood, but it’s clear that her suspension is almost a way of feeling better.”
Wolf eventually found her creative team for Pressure — metal-inspired electronic (etc.) producer Scro came on as executive producer, with additional production and input from Cody Tarpley (KREWELLA, Siiickbrain), Lynn Gunn (PVRIS), and others. But in the lead up to her second set, she felt under siege by shoulds coming from the industry: She should have achieved more by now. She should look a certain way. She should stick to a prescribed sound even if it doesn’t represent where she is as an artist. “I wasn’t feeling seen or accepted,” Wolf says. “So I wanted this album to really express the emotions that came with that: the soft doubt, the lack of confidence, the comparing myself to literally everyone that breathes. This was my chance to really lay it all out and be the most honest I’ve ever been.”
Music has long been that safe space for Wolf. Despite growing up in Long Island in a big Italian family, she’d shrink outside of the home, and was so shy at school that she would hide out in the music room during lunchtime. Seated at the piano, though, Wolf found her voice little by little. In high school, a prescient teacher barred her from returning to the annual talent show unless she agreed to perform an original song. She did, and the experience was revelatory. While attending the SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Music, Wolf learned both modern and traditional methods, studying songwriting and taking a gap year for classical piano. Though instructors encouraged her to become a concert pianist, Wolf’s heart lay within the boundaryless world of DIY. Another truism that’s followed Wolf since early days: “Whenever I sense that people are trying to lump me into certain crowds or directions, I instinctively feel the need to prove everyone wrong.”
Wolf gloriously subverted expectations when she released the first taste of Pressure last year — a slowly building, hard-riffing, and bracingly honest ballad called “In My Room,” where the singer aches for companionship in her own inimitable way: “I want your things in my room / I miss you all of the time / I stalk myself on the internet / Just to see what you’ll find.” As Wolf puts it, “The song is really about the obsessive state I can get in when the one person who I want to see me is not seeing me. It just drives me insane internally and gets me thinking really crazy thoughts.”
She’s never been a stranger to getting vulnerable on record. Or sharing her darkest impulses, as on the howling opener, “Kill You Off,” which evolves in lockstep with Wolf’s emotional journey — from brightly glitchy D’n’B to squealing metal — as she imagines ridding herself once and for all of a negative influence. She coos sweetly at first before ending the song in a hail of full-body screams. “I’m talking about how I would travel to the end of the earth to destroy this person, and using the sonic palette to support that,” says Wolf of her holistic approach. “That’s why it gets so heavy. I’m yelling my face off to emphasize how much I really need this person out of my life.”
Elsewhere, Wolf releases a more broadly felt sort of pressure, pushing back against societal beauty standards, while also challenging her existing insecurities around love. Backed by thick riffs and transcendent melodies, the intensely defenseless “Jennifer’s Body” borrows its title from Diablo Cody’s cult classic black comedy (which itself was named after the incredibly dark Hole song) and features a sing-along chorus that will feel instantly relatable to anyone prone to self-comparison. “I have this issue where it doesn’t matter how much love someone is giving me,” Wolf admits. “I will see someone beautiful and think, ‘That’s who they should be with.’”
Comparison takes a fresh form on the shape-shifting thrasher “Pearl,” which finds Wolf howling into the abyss as she tells off a copycat artist: “You’re such an actress pretending you still have this / Your sh*t is average, on the low you can’t get past this.” It’s one of several moments on Pressure where the secret confidence that powers Wolf’s career — as a staunchly DIY creator who’s hands on with every aspect of her output from the music to the artwork — comes to the surface. A refreshing flex from a woman who used to be too bashful to speak to her peers.
As Wolf prepares to release Pressure and kick off its accompanying headlining tour, she’s a little bit terrified, but mostly thrilled, to share her innermost thoughts with an ever-growing audience who can no doubt relate — who among us hasn’t been told what to do, how to look, who to be? By taking that familiar pressure and using it as fuel for her restless, contrarian creative engine, Wolf offers up her most compelling vision yet: an artist who has never been more herself.
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