Her most well-known lyric is probably, “I’d slit my own throat just to see if you’d mourn me.” Her fridge is stocked with Monster Energy (the radioactive green original), and she has a Twilight logo and dagger tattoo grazing her knuckles.

If you’ve only heard Julia Wolf’s music online, it’s easy to assume the alt-pop artist’s brooding, gothic-leaning image bleeds into her real-life personality. But calling in from her apartment in New York, she tells me she’s been spending most of her time recently playing Pokémon Pokopia and binging reruns of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

Growing up in a suburban stretch of Long Island, New York, Wolf spent much of her time in high school by herself. “I was always eating lunch alone in the music room,” she says. Instead of socialising with her classmates, she would escape into fictional worlds – Cirque du Freak, The Vampire Diaries, and a rotation of teen dramas.

It wasn’t until a music teacher insisted she perform an original track for her final school talent show that Wolf first began making music. “The thought of it was mortifying,” she says. “I was already so embarrassed, but the need to create will always outweigh the embarrassment.”

That persistence has taken her far, leading to breakout viral track “In My Room,” collaborations with Yeat and Drake, and, most recently, a sample by fakemink on his track “51 Ttashpel Pony Ave”. But she’s quick to resist any suggestion that this was inevitable. Just last year, she was being rejected by labels and playing open mic nights and bars where no one was listening. “I can’t tell you the amount of dead ends I’ve hit to get to this point,” she says. “I feel like to get this kind of career, you just have to relentlessly choose it over everything else, all of the time.”

The fictional worlds she grew up inside remain an important tether. Her merch and visuals now circle the Twi-hard universe, with her upcoming tour even opening in Forks, Washington – the town that inspired Twilight. “At a very early age, my mom was always playing scary movies in the house, and our house decor was also quite gloomy with lots of skulls and bones,” she says. “I think about my first crush being Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and how much I loved the Tim Burton films, and it makes sense that the vampire aspect was what I latched onto.”

As her music spreads further online, her own relationship with the internet has become more complicated; she is often jumping online to interact with fan edits and videos before just as quickly jumping out. “I feel like the more I am growing as an artist, the less I can look at all of this stuff online” she explains. “I am the type of person to compare myself to literally anyone who breathes. So I need that separation to remember what I like and who I am and how I want to write, and not be pulled in a million different directions all the time.”

For now though, Wolf is being pulled in one clear direction. The rest of the year is already booked up with festival appearances and The Deep End world tour - named after her single of the same title, released today (May 29).

“My comfort zone is the deep end,” she says of the newest track, which circles the emotional labour of relationships. “The drowning and floundering of it all when it comes to relationships is sort of where I feel comfortable.” Later, she puts it more bluntly: “The core of it is: hey, I’m drowning, and we both know it’s because I will voluntarily do that.”

With snippets released throughout the month, the track has already become fodder for Twilight edits, lyric videos and alt-girl fit checks. “It’s cool to see these kids using my tracks for their videos online, because that’s what I would have done in high school too,” she says. These full circle moments continue to crop up for Wolf, whether that's hearing her “In My Room” crackling through a speaker at the bar, or a friend sending a video of it playing in a thrift store, “It’s so full circle,” she says. “I was the quietest kid on Earth, but now so many people know my song.”