Those early singles, from “Suburbia” through to the 2022 EP and the string of singles thereafter in 2023, warrant comparisons to early Billie Eilish and Remi Wolf. In that way, they still feel distinctly of their era. In those immediate post-pandemic years, Johanningmeier was still finding her footing. The early iteration of a music career can so often feel touch and go. And for her, it really was.

Just after one of her tours in 2022, Johanningmeier was preparing to work jobs again. She’d just about run out of money, was dealing with a breakup, and found herself in the midst of a medical emergency. The idea that life as a professional musician could ever be possible long term was feeling tenuous. For a pep talk, she reached out to Chappell Roan, who at that time was herself only just making the rounds on the internet, long before her meteoric rise. “I had just started seeing her blowing up all over my phone, so I reached out,” Johanningmeier remembers. “I was like, ‘Girl, can we get coffee? I’m freaking out.’ Then we did, and she was like, ‘You have to keep going. You’re not dumb. You’re smart. You’re smart enough to do it.’ That was really nice. It was nice that it was framed as ‘you’re smart enough,’ because ‘you’re good enough’ doesn’t really mean anything to me. Then she gave me a bunch of her clothes to sell to pay for my surgery.” Roan was, back then, a lifeline. The idea that they could be labelmates or share a festival bill, as they did at this year’s Daisy Chain Fields, wasn’t even a thought. That all of those things have since come to fruition feels more full circle than Johanningmeier can fully appreciate. 

Returning to releasing in 2025, Johanningmeier brought a new, matured, anthem-pop sound to the table. Packaged into a new EP, titled because the tracks are listed in the order they were written, Johanningmeier’s latest body of work has catapulted her into the stratosphere of proper pop stardom. It is, in the best of ways, exactly what you’d expect of a now-adult Hayley Williams stan-turned-star, perfectly hooky yet unsparingly profound. There are pulsing synths but also chunky 00s-inspired guitar power chords. Everything is perfectly sing-alongable, but never unbearably so. “Cherry Cola,” the project’s breakout, is the sort of song you’d chant solitarily painting your converse on the edge of your teenage bed. It could make even the settled adults among us lovesick puppies again.  Johanningmeier then doubled down on the edge she found on with this year’s country-tinged “snake the drain” and soft-rock “slug,” which is out today — both alt-pop ballads that cement her as the Avril Lavigne of the next generation.

“It took so long to make,” Johanningmeier says of the process. “I don’t listen to much pop music, but I love pop music. In working with Jon, we try to figure out how to make it as big as possible. With ‘Skittles,’ for example, the whole process was trying to make something that felt as big as I thought it was. It was asking how I got down the feeling of loving that person.”