Julia Alexa

Julia Alexa (legal name Julia Alexandra Mueller, born around 2001 in Zug, Switzerland) is a Swiss singer, songwriter and entirely self-taught bedroom producer based in Zürich, with working stints in Berlin and Los Angeles. She has passed 100 million Spotify streams with no record label, no managers pulling strings and no formal training, while simultaneously pursuing a master’s in pharmaceutical sciences at ETH Zürich, with a thesis in cancer-immunology research at UCLA. In 2026 she opened a second business line, selling her own voice as the commercial sample pack Dark Angelic Vocals. Swiss national radio once introduced her with the only headline that fits: “Who is the streaming multimillionaire?”

Origin

Piano at seven, vocal training (classical, musical and pop) from 13, and a father who installed GarageBand on her MacBook, the formative accident that turned her into a producer. As a young teenager she posted cover songs on YouTube, inspired, she has said, by “other small online creators” rather than mainstream stars. The lightning bolt was Billie Eilish, summer 2017, right after Don’t Smile at Me: seeing that Eilish and Finneas made everything in a bedroom convinced her she “could make music without needing other people’s help.” Eilish’s first Swiss show, at Halle 622 (Eilish herself was about 17 at the time), was literally the first concert Julia ever attended; she walked out knowing. Early influences round out the picture: Clairo’s “pretty girl,” Joji, Conan Gray, Isaac Dunbar, Lil Peep’s “Star Shopping,” the Twilight soundtrack, and later Gracie Abrams for lyricism and Paula Hartmann for German-language writing. No exact birthdate has ever been published; her October 2023 press kit listed her at 22, which puts her around 25 as of 2026. Her self-description, on her verified Genius page, is still the whole brand in one line: “i write & produce music in my bedroom.”

The lofi years

She started releasing in 2019 via DistroKid (“the first songs were very bad,” by her own account, but she shipped anyway, treating every song as a learning rep), issued the debut EP Lucid Dreams that year, posted covers “every single Saturday” on a YouTube channel that never took off, and found her scene in 2020 through the online lofi community: collaborations with Belfa (“Everything I Couldn’t Be,” then the four-song Better Days EP in June 2021), plus “when the clouds disappear” with The Bootleg Boy and Sorrow in July 2021, with reposting channels like TheBootlegBoy amplifying her before TikTok mattered: “crucial,” she says, to the initial blow-up. The Belfa-produced “please hold me” (February 2022) later became the opening track of her debut album, and the era’s collaborative sprawl shows in her features ledger: the Love Stays, Pain Fades project with Josiah MacCartney, plus guest vocals on tracks with Snøw, Rnla, Ely Waves, Zebatin, FairWay and Elijah Moon.

Spotify editors found the tracks organically and playlisted her at a moment, roughly 2020-21, when she says there was far less competition for editorial slots. Her early solo single “Upside Down” (August 2020) became one of her highest-streamed tracks, logging over 15.7 million plays per third-party trackers. A 2022 crossover with Rxseboy and Zaini (“i don’t wanna be me anymore,” via Relentless/Sony UK) was the first major-adjacent placement; by early 2023 she had 40 million streams, and by the time her album press kit went out that October the number read 50 million-plus.

The albums

The rollout to the debut ran through 2023: “alone with me” (February 27), written from a real heartbreak; “nothing left to lose” (August 18), still one of her most popular tracks on Apple Music; “if i’m being honest,” “it hasn’t killed me yet,” “i don’t wanna be saved” and “cigarettes” staged on SoundCloud through the autumn; “i hate how i love u” the day before the album. That summer she also played her first-ever live show, a Campfire Stage slot at Bern’s Gurtenfestival in July 2023, followed by Radar Festival on September 16; she had never expected to perform live at all and learned the setup logistics from YouTube and Google.

Her 17-track debut i want to live forever when i die (November 10, 2023, distributed via Ditto Music) was written and recorded mostly in her bedroom, its title drawn from “a deep fear of being forgotten and feeling unimportant,” its sound blending sad pop and singer-songwriter with hip-hop/trap and alternative elements, its themes running first love, heartbreak, loneliness and self-harm with deliberate bluntness: “there’s no limit where I say, ‘that’s too much now.’” Swiss public radio (SRF 3) profiled her two days before release; her first-ever headline show followed at Zürich’s X-tra Musikcafé on November 24, where about 100 people sang her lyrics back, “really touching.” A December EP under the alias “juli” (it’s december and i’m tired of being brave, six tracks including “white sheets” and “heart of stone”) slipped out with almost no announcement. The 10-track bandaids (July 26, 2024), trailed by the June single “Antidote” and billed by Swiss Music Export as the spiritual follow-up to the debut, ran its medical metaphor front to back: “side effects,” “half alive,” “death row,” “open heart surgery,” “prayers,” “i’m sry i love u,” “i remember,” “bad times.” The 2024 Swiss festival circuit followed: OpenAir St. Gallen, M4Music, Moon & Stars in Locarno, plus club dates at Bierhübeli Bern and Kaufleuten Zürich with Kings Elliot and a return to X-tra. In October 2026 she makes her first international support run, opening all eight European dates of Christian Gates’s I Believe In Ghosts Tour, from Amsterdam’s Melkweg to The Garage in London.

The gothic pivot

Two months in Berlin and two in LA reshaped the sound; she told Stadt-Anzeiger the new material was moving “more in the direction of alternative, i.e. rock music, or dark pop... much less this sad-girl stuff... or the Billie Eilish style.” The visual tell: her lowercase diary-titles gave way to ALL-CAPS gothics, BLOODY HANDS, HEAVENSENT, PRETTY WHEN I CRY, VAMPIRE, ABYSS, released 2025 under exclusive license to Rebellion Records, the label founded by PLVTINUM whose orbit (Chris Grey, “Jennifer’s Body”) also crosses Dutch Melrose’s catalog. Producer Nico Fabito handled “BLOODY HANDS,” “HEAVENSENT” and “PRETTY WHEN I CRY”; “VAMPIRE” she produced herself. Around them came “body bag,” singled out by Swiss press as painfully catchy, “cause of death,” “my religion,” a German-language feature on “schwarze tage,” and the year-closing “burning alive” (December 26, 2025).

Her biggest single-song crossover came October 2024: “BLADES” with Ufo361, the chart-topping German rapper, on his album NUR FÜR DICH 2 via Sony’s Stay High/Epic Germany, born from an Instagram Reel he found of her singing. 2026 brought “die for you” (April 17, produced by Kre8ore, “my fave song i’ve ever made”) and “nirvana” (June 19), a duet with US emo-rap artist Call Me Karizma, produced by Jacob Evan Magness, with the writing credited to Julia Alexandra Mueller and Morgan Francis Parriott, Karizma’s real name. Both 2026 singles carry a label credit reading “live forever,” an echo of her debut album’s title; whether Rebellion and “live forever” are boutique labels, artist-services deals or informal ventures has never been clarified publicly, and her own bio still says independent.

The double life

The lab and the studio run on the same personality: “very detail-oriented and very perfectionist.” As of her deepest interview (September 2024) she was still enrolled and preparing to travel to Los Angeles to finish an ETH Zürich master’s thesis in Cancer Immunology Research at UCLA while releasing a catalog about heartbreak and self-harm, therapy in both directions: she calls the songwriting itself therapy and treasures messages from listeners describing her music as a “comfort space.” Whether the degree is now finished is an open question; her 2026 sample-pack bio drops the academic line entirely and describes her simply as an independent singer, songwriter and producer “from Berlin and Los Angeles.” In a May 2026 interview she credited plain ambition for carrying both careers at once. She has also spoken about the gendered fight to claim her title: feeling she had to be “better than [men]” before calling herself a producer, an insecurity she says she has outgrown.

The vocal-sample business

Producers kept finding her openly-uploaded SoundCloud stems and sampling them without permission (that world produced placements with $uicideboys, Powfu, Rxseboy and German artists Souly and Ufo361; an r/G59 thread even identified her as the uncredited vocalist sampled on a “father, hold me” track, noting she also sang for the project Leave The Gun, Take The Cannoli), so she got “very exclusive” about who receives stems, then turned the leak into a product: “Dark Angelic Vocals by Julia Alexa” (April 2026, Black Octopus Sound, also on Splice), 375 royalty-free samples, 254 vocal loops and 121 one-shots, 1.48 GB of 24-bit WAV cleared for Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud and label releases, marketed around her “billboard charting vocals” as “dark feminine energy mixed with soft ethereal vocals.” She underestimated the labor (comping and mixing took longest) and flags the ethical edge openly: packs like hers could train AI voice clones without consent, “a threat” vocalists specifically now face.

Famous abroad, anonymous at home

Swiss press keeps circling the same paradox: a “small star” of global streaming who “can still sit relaxed in a café” unrecognized in Zürich. She calls Switzerland “probably the hardest place to live music-wise” for its missing creative community, found “family” in LA, and rates Berlin’s hip-hop culture “really sick.” She sings almost exclusively in English for the anglophone sad-pop internet she came up in, and handles her own marketing happily, unusual by her own admission: “a lot of us just want to be artists and not influencers,” but she likes the game. The footprint matches the story: a primary Instagram (@juliaalex.a, her stated main point of contact), two listed “spam” side accounts, a TikTok bio that reads simply “i make music,” and a YouTube channel that only found traction after she pivoted from weekly covers to posting Shorts five to ten times a day.

Audience & reception

Press comparisons cluster around Billie Eilish (her own north star), Lana Del Rey, Gracie Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers; Zurich’s Stadt-Anzeiger built its 2024 profile on the Eilish-to-own-style arc, and starzone.ch titled its 2025 feature, roughly, “sadness has a name.” National recognition came early and oddly top-down: SRF 3 put her on public radio two days before her debut album, billing the then-22-year-old as a mystery, the streaming multimillionaire nobody knew. Reviews from Pop Passion Blog tracked her single-by-single through the album cycle. What she does not have is a forum fandom: no dedicated subreddit exists, and her Reddit trail is producers asking how to license her vocals (r/FL_Studio) or fans of other acts tracing an uncredited sample back to her (r/G59), evidence of a fanbase that lives on Spotify, TikTok and Instagram rather than message boards, and of a voice that travels further than the name attached to it.

Streaming milestones

Timeline

Frequently asked

What is Julia Alexa’s real name?

Julia Alexandra Mueller, as credited on her master recordings (“℗© Julia Alexandra Mueller // Ditto Music”) and in the songwriting credits of “nirvana.” Genius lists “Julia Mueller” and “Julia Alexandra Mueller” as her AKAs.

How old is Julia Alexa?

No exact birthdate has ever been published. Her February 2023 coverage listed her at 21 and her October 2023 press kit at 22, consistent with a birth year around 2001, roughly 25 as of 2026.

Is Julia Alexa signed to a label?

Her official bio says fully independent, and her catalog runs through DistroKid and Ditto Music. Her 2025 singles carry an “under exclusive license to Rebellion Records” credit and her 2026 singles a “live forever” label credit; no public source clarifies whether these are boutique labels or artist-services licensing deals, so her exact current structure remains an open question.

Who is “juli”? Is that the same artist?

The December 2023 EP it’s december and i’m tired of being brave is credited to “juli,” and the alias resurfaces in the credits of 2026’s “nirvana.” She has never explained the variant in an interview; the writing credits trace back to Julia Alexandra Mueller either way.

Did Julia Alexa really sing on $uicideboys material?

Her vocals reached the $uicideboys orbit through sampling rather than a formal feature: producers found her openly-posted stems, and an r/G59 thread identified her as the uncredited vocalist sampled on a “father, hold me” track. Her sample-pack marketing cites placements with $uicideboys, Powfu, Rxseboy, Souly and Ufo361.

Is she still studying at ETH Zürich?

As of September 2024 she was finishing a pharmaceutical-sciences master’s thesis in cancer immunology research at UCLA. Her 2026 materials no longer mention the degree, and no source confirms whether she graduated, paused or simply stopped citing it.

Further reading

Her Rebellion Records license puts her one step from Dutch Melrose, who features on “Jennifer’s Body” with Chris Grey and PLVTINUM, the label’s founder. For the wider map of self-produced, streaming-first dark pop she belongs to, see Artemas (another self-taught bedroom auteur), Ari Abdul and Isabel LaRosa; for the independent-by-design career path her 100M-streams-no-label arc mirrors, see Christian Gates.

Discography