Wolf writes songs to commiserate with the lovesick, especially the ones willing to spend $30 on a White Pages Full Report about the person they’re crushing on. She understands, better than almost any singer-songwriter working today, love’s power to destabilize and derange. “I stalk myself on the internet just to see what you’ll find” is the lyric from her limerence anthem “In My Room” that blew her up — the same one Drake sent her in a 6 a.m. Instagram DM in July, punctuated with several exploding-head emojis. She and her boyfriend and manager, Tanner Barry, “were freaking out for ages when we got the message,” Wolf says. 

Drake’s endorsement capped a breakout year for Wolf, one in which her audience expanded dramatically and her once-underground songs began charting. Boosted in part by the Twilight-themed TikTok edits she made for “In My Room,” she went from a modest online following to a multi-million-listener audience. As of November, she saw “In My Room” spend 17 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart; collaborated with Kelly on a cover of the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris”; released Pressure, an album that’s well on its way to 90 million Spotify streams; and sang intro vocals on Drake’s “Dog House,” which became her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100. With so many eyes on her, she’s far too self-conscious to keep stalking herself on the internet. Now, everyone else does it for her.

In November, Wolf played Vans Warped Tour to a crowd of thousands crowd-surfing and screaming alongside her. Her backstage area was packed. The merch line was neverending. It was the kind of day when reality suddenly set in: Wolf fully aware that she’d manifested her dream. Right after the show, she broke down in tears. 

Wolf is arriving at the tipping point of celebrity, approaching a level of fame where she will soon be out of reach of her fans, unable to maintain the proximity she has always cultivated. Until now, she made a point of saying hi to everyone, but that will soon be impossible. Against her will, she is likely to become less accessible. Right now, she is fully present, but she is unsure how to proceed: She doesn’t feel comfortable charging for meet-and-greets, and she can no longer look at her comment sections. “The more exposure you get, the more comments come in that aren’t so great to see,” she says. “And those ones really mess with my head.” 

Tucked away backstage, Wolf wears a fur-trimmed coat, baggy jeans, a belt with a buffalo buckle, and an electric blue cami. Earlier this week, she told a stylist via email that she feels at home in anything Lorelai Gilmore might wear. She arrived at the venue at 11 a.m. and immediately put The Office on the dressing room’s flatscreen. Her method for managing her nerves before a show involves meticulously paced-out drinking. She has a beer at 3 p.m. and takes a ceremonial tequila shot at 5. At 6, she forces herself to inhale a steam and a tea. Then comes another shot at 6:30, and a final one before she goes onstage at 8.

The beer comes a little earlier today, as this is one of Wolf’s first substantial interviews. She hasn’t been media trained and doesn’t know what the phrase “off the record” means. Barry explains that they’re trying to expand Wolf’s narrative. “We want there to be more talk about her beyond Twilight TikTok, you know? We want people to get to know the real Julia.”

So far, there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding. Wolf is routinely compared to Amy Lee of Evanescence, perhaps because of their expertly pitched, vocal-flipping voices, but more likely because of their shared dark hair and pale skin. “It’s funny because I never even thought of myself as emo,” Wolf says. She’s stopped dyeing her hair, and she leans forward to reveal warm chestnut roots. Likewise, her latest album, Pressure, feels less like the morbid immediacy of “In My Room” and more aligned with the sensibilities of post-Skrillex digital wunderkinds — 2hollis, Jane Remover, Frost Children — artists who inspire Wolf and whose music she listens to backstage. “We really tried to get outside of the emo box,” she says. While she’s always keen to drift off in other directions, right now her music threads glitchcore and hip-hop through a ’90s alt-rock lens, all tethered by Wolf’s throaty, emotionally charged vocals. “Jennifer’s Body,” another standout and “Drake’s favorite song,” says Wolf, is essential to this era, with its midwestern guitar and toxic feminine sentiments: “Diagnose me how you like / The worse I get, the more I hide.”

Wolf is emo only in the sense that she is a wilfully outcast homebody. She’s trying to carve out a path to fame that focuses on the art itself, without the noise and networking that often accompanies it. She declined an invitation to a Playboy party last night. “If you listen to a couple of my songs, you’ll know why,” she says. “I’m way too self-conscious for all that.” Some lyrical cases in point: “Clam up like I’m wearing a wire,” or, better still, the ultimate anti-social tirade: “I slit my own throat just to see if you’d mourn me.”

In high school, Wolf was so shy that her face would turn bright red if anyone asked her for a pencil. “I had so much anxiety, and I felt so hideous, I couldn’t engage at all,” she recalls. “I was scared of my own shadow.” At 6 feet, she was among the tallest students, a major source of insecurity. “I have terrible posture now because I always tried to slouch down,” she says. People made fun of her ears and took advantage of her shyness. Girls would even make her pick up the trash from their table when they’d finished lunch. 

She took refuge in Twilight, which “saved me when I just didn’t have friends,” she says. In heroine Bella Swan she found both solace and aspiration: a fellow shy girl cherished by someone capable of loving her unconditionally and eternally. Earlier this year, Wolf played a show at the actual Swan house in Washington, gracing the place with its first-ever live performance and sleeping in Bella’s room for two nights. “That’s been my dream since eighth grade when I first read the book,” she says. 

Wolf spent much of her twenties searching for her Twilight romance, but she kept running into fuckboys and situationships. “Horrendous men,” she recalls. “I just kept getting ghosted. I was having mental breakdowns.” She fell in love with Barry three years ago, at 28, and it unearthed insecurities she didn’t even know she had. Every day, Barry tells her how wonderful she is, yet she still “doesn’t feel good enough.”

Back in the dressing room, Wolf watches Barry play Fortnite on the flatscreen. As he boots up, “In My Room” begins to play on the game’s soundtrack. Wolf laughs at my surprise, but she’s used to it by now. “At this point, it doesn’t even feel like me,” she says. Barry headbangs along to the song, flashing Wolf a glowing look before locking back in.

As stage time draws closer, Barry turns off the game. Wolf whinnies to warm up her voice and begins lightly tapping her vocal cords. Then comes time for the final tequila shot. “Good show, great show,” everyone — Barry, Wolf, her bandmates and friend — says to each other, wincing in disgust. 

The stage manager calls time: five minutes! “My voice is chopped,” Wolf panics to Barry. “You say that every time,” he replies. But today, there’s a spark of confidence somewhere beneath the fear. She’s another show closer to the big time. “There’s a place for me somewhere at the top,” she’d told me a few minutes earlier.

When the lights go down at 8 on the dot, Wolf walks to the edge of that same X with none of the fear that dogged her all day. The audience screams. Fans wearing years-old merch wave at her. Wolf opens her mouth, and for the entire set, she sings note-perfect. She locks into the microphone, occasionally allowing herself a smile. “We love you, LA,” she says at the end, then walks off to the roars trailing after her. She hugs and kisses Barry. “That was good,” she says. “I think I did good.”