Julia Wolf

Glen Head, dressed in black since sixth grade

Julia Jade Capello grew up in Glen Head, on the north shore of Long Island, in an Italian-American household: her father came from Turin, her mother's family from the Lazio countryside outside Rome. She went to North Shore High School and then to SUNY Purchase, where she read English literature. The surname she performs under began as a nickname from her younger sister, picked for what it suggested about strength and protection.

She has said she started dressing entirely in black in sixth grade, and that the uniform was partly cover for anxiety she had no other language for. The songwriting arrived late and under duress. She wrote her first song in her final year of school only because a music teacher announced that the senior showcase would accept nothing but originals. She credits him by name — Mr Kerschner — for noticing how isolated she was and pushing her into it, and says she never looked back after that performance.

Purgatory EPs and the album about not leaving

From 2019 she released singles on her own, distributed through AWAL, working with the producer Scro — a collaborator who has stayed with her through every record since. The early material travelled on TikTok and on streaming playlists on the strength of a sparse, diaristic kind of pop production. The 2021 EP Girls in Purgatory, built around femininity, self-image and the gap between the two, gave her both a sound and the name she later used for her own imprint.

Her first full-length, Good Thing We Stayed, followed in early 2023, and the title carries its own story: her father had proposed selling up and moving the family to Italy to open a pizza shop. The house went, then he changed his mind, telling her he had a feeling they needed to stay because he believed in her music. The record runs her own history in sequence, from school onwards, over arrangements that split the difference between electronics and guitars. She has handled her own artwork and visual direction throughout, and the influences she names stretch from Avril Lavigne and The All-American Rejects to Jack Harlow, SZA, Baby Keem and Phoebe Bridgers.

A song, a film franchise and an accident

"In My Room" arrived on 22 March 2024, written with Nicholas Bergere and Steph Jones and produced by Scro. Wolf described it as a song about how dark her brain can get. What moved it was not radio but TikTok users cutting it against footage from the Twilight films; the fandom adopted it wholesale, and the track became the thing that reframed her career. It is certified platinum in the United States, silver in the UK and gold in New Zealand, has passed 80 million Spotify streams, and spent ten weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 while becoming her first genuine alternative-radio record. AWAL signed her properly in January 2025, and an acoustic version followed that February.

The Twilight connection has stopped being accidental. On 10 September 2026 she played a free acoustic set at the Forever Twilight in Forks festival in Washington state, a week before her own headline run began.

Pressure, and refusing to be palatable

Her second album, Pressure, came in 2025 and pushed hard away from the first. Emo, shoegaze, grunge and metallic textures sit over pop instincts that are still recognisably hers, and the lyrics circle creative anxiety rather than retreating from it. Wolf's framing was blunt: she no longer wanted to sound palatable, she wanted to sound powerful, and said the album was her chance to be the most honest she had ever been. Scro produced alongside Cody Tarpley and Lynn Gunn.

Reviews were warm rather than ecstatic. Music Connection gave it seven out of ten, with Ruby Risch calling it a raw, cathartic listen that embraces contrast and finds beauty in the wreckage. Critics writing about her tend to reach for Caroline Polachek and Lorde on the pop side while noting the alt-rock and shoegaze underneath. She also spent part of 2025 and early 2026 opening for MGK on the Lost Americana tour, which did useful work in front of a rock crowd that had only met her through one single.

The 2026 run

The Deep End World Tour was announced on 7 April 2026, with presales from 8 April and general sale on 10 April. It started as 33 dates and grew to 44, running from 31 July 2026 to 20 March 2027, with extra nights added in London, New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles and several shows moved into larger rooms. Festival slots are folded in: Lollapalooza on 31 July, Hinterland, and Reading and Leeds.

The headline run proper opened on 17 September at Mohawk in Austin, then took in Irving Plaza in New York on 2 October, Paradise Rock Club in Boston on 5 October, the Warfield in San Francisco on 23 October and two nights at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on 25 and 26 October. The UK and Europe follow through November and December — Dublin, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, KOKO in London on 25 November, Cologne and Paris — closing in Berlin before the year ends. South American festival dates in Buenos Aires, Santiago and São Paulo are set for March 2027.

The newest music has landed mid-tour. "Deep End" came earlier in 2026, and on 9 September she released "Lamb" with Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, recorded at a Portland studio she described as covered in clouds and rain, with an animated video by Dylan Oscroft. She called the song an examination of the fragile space between trust and fear.

On stage

The show is tight rather than sprawling: seventeen songs, roughly an hour on the clock. The order has held steady across the autumn, opening with "Wishbone" and "Kill You Off" before "Loser", "Deep End" and "Jennifer's Body", dropping into "Burning House" around the halfway mark for the only real lull, and finishing with "You've Lost A Lot of Blood" and "In My Room".

Writing after a sold-out 9:30 Club in Washington on 28 September, Parklife DC praised the range between the softer material and the heavier arrangements, singled out "Pearl" for the hip-hop beat sitting under a full rock band, and noted an easy rapport with the crowd from start to finish. Bee Blackwell, an Austin band working a 1990s alternative-rock seam, opens the North American dates with a half-hour set; Scro takes the support slot in the UK and Europe.