genre rock

Since her days as a kid on Long Island, pop-rock singer-songwriter Julia Wolf has been fascinated by horror films. “My mom was putting on slasher films from when I was in the womb,” she says.

Over time, such grisly themes began to spill over into her music. In early 2024, she thought of the lyric “I’d slit my own throat just to see if you’d mourn me” while crafting a track about a recent ex — but then texted her sister and best friend to make sure that the line wasn’t overly morbid. Soon after receiving the go-ahead, she found another lyric, “I stalk myself on the internet just to see what you’ll find,” tucked away in her phone’s Notes app. Before long, Wolf had enough material to begin recording.

“It was just the choice of how vulnerable I wanted to get,” she recalls. “It’s something that took me until my thirties to understand that that’s what I want to do — be as honest as possible.”

The resulting track, “In My Room,” has pushed the 30-year-old from the indie shadows into a hitmaker. Propelled by its niche usage by a particular cult fandom on TikTok, its following has since carried over to the Billboard charts: the grungy song has reached a No. 27 high in 17 weeks on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and a No. 21 high on Hot Alternative Songs. And its success has opened doors that Wolf can hardly fathom, including an Instagram direct message from — and eventual collaboration with — Drake earlier this year, who opened their conversation by quoting lyrics from the breakthrough.

Raised on a steady diet of Avril Lavigne and emo music, Wolf began experimenting with music in high school at open mic nights and restaurant gigs around Queens. Debut EP Girls in Purgatory arrived in 2021 and full-length Good Thing We Stayed followed in 2023, with the latter’s pop-leaning singles “Get Off My” and “Gothic Babe Tendencies” with blackbear garnering buzz within the indie scene. As Wolf readied “In My Room” in 2024, she teased it relentlessly on TikTok. Though heavier and darker than anything she’d made before, the song quickly gained traction on the platform, thanks to Wolf tying snippets of the track to rotating images of different Twilight characters and scenes.

“Julia is the most Twilight-obsessed person I’ve ever met in my entire life,” NU.WORLD Management founder Tanner Barry, Wolf’s manager since 2023, says. “When it started working, it was so easy for us to keep playing into it.”

Lifted by several posts of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson as Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, Wolf released the song in full in March 2024. But as the trend began to wane, funding dried-up, according to Barry. At the time, they were working with independent distributor Stem, which was hesitant to back a bigger push for “In My Room” because of it being based around a timely fad, Wolf says.

“Since the song was already out for so long, they didn’t want to add any more funds to it. It was just me and Tanner thinking of what we can do to [grow] this organically.”

She remained convinced that the Twilight universe would remain the most receptive vessels for “In My Room,” and every time she continued to post the song with a clip surrounding the franchise’s characters, it’d rack up hundreds of thousands of views. Wolf and her team brought those stats to fellow independent distributor AWAL, and while they were in discussion, the track experienced its biggest viral wave yet, with a TikTok video celebrating Stewart’s beauty in a collage of photos. Today, the video has more than six million views. “We were all panicking like, ‘What do we do?’ ” Wolf remembers.

She quickly followed it up with a clip in the same format of Twilight co-star Ashley Greene (who portrays Alice Cullen), which has since surpassed 12 million views. Wolf and AWAL reached a deal this January, and the company helped boost Wolf’s visibility, in part by funding microinfluencer campaigns. The timing of the hit’s resurgence proved fortuitous: She had nearly wrapped the recording for 2025 full-length Pressure — which ultimately arrived in May — and the scorching hot single provided a push in the lead-up. Initial plans to release single “Jennifer’s Body,” a nod to a different cult fandom, were temporarily shelved, and she instead opted for an acoustic version of “In My Room” in February.

“She’s such a good singer,” Barry says. “I thought [the acoustic video] would be a good way to show people that she actually sounds like that.”

The following month, Drake surfaced in Wolf’s DMs. According to Wolf, he discovered the song after a woman requested that he play it at a club. “Shout out to that girl for having my back,” she says today with a laugh. The two then exchanged numbers and began to talk about making music together. Wolf recorded a few demos to send to the superstar, and one titled “Dog House” became the winner. Wolf’s raw vocal serves as the intro to the track, which erupts into a high octane rage-rap single that also features Yeat. The song arrived in September, and in turn became Wolf’s first entry on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 53.

“She was at probably two million monthly listeners and jumped up just shy of 10 million,” Barry reflects of the A-list co-sign. “We were seeing the highest streams of [Pressure] on a daily basis. What Drake did so well, that we’re so appreciative of, is he allowed [the song] to be a showcase of Julia.”

Drake also supported Wolf in the months before its release, watching her perform at Toronto’s Velvet Underground in June and sharing some advice over dinner afterward.

“He was expressing how everyone has access to the internet and is able to say anything they want,” Wolf says. “The loudest people aren’t the right people, but it just feels that way. I get so in my head about internet comments and people being mean. He can definitely relate to that.”

But even with a coveted Drake collaboration opening up an entirely new fan base, Wolf remains devoted to the crowd that got her to this moment: In August, she performed an intimate showcase for 60 fans in Forks, Washington, at the location used for Bella Swan’s home in the Twilight movies. And her star only continues to grow: She released 2MUCHPRESSURE, a remix EP helmed by producer duo 2DUMB on Halloween and will begin touring arenas in support of mgk later this month.

“What helps me stay grounded is that ‘In My Room’ existed for so long when nobody cared,” Wolf says. “I truly believe that any song that I believe in can work. It just needs all these factors to get it to click.”

A version of this story appears in the Nov. 15, 2025, issue of Billboard.