People have described my songs as a Trojan horse,” says the New York-born singer-songwriter Juliet Ivy. “The lyrics creep up on you—you listen and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, this is so sweet.’ And then you hear what I’m singing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, did she just say we’re all going to die?’”

Those dualities are all over Juliet’s music, and they’ve intrigued listeners enough for her to rack up millions of streams and get bookings at festivals like Head in the Clouds despite only having released a handful of songs. With her second EP, led by the candy-coated yet troubled single “is it my face?,” she opens her book to a new chapter,

Juliet grew up longing to be a singer, playing hours of the karaoke game SingStar as a child, but she didn’t know how to go about pursuing music as a career. “I was like, ‘When I’m 16, I’m going to audition for American Idol,’” she recalls. While researching colleges, she learned about NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, which would give her the grounding she needed to take her artistic pursuits to the next level—and she applied and got in.

When she arrived at NYU, she hit the ground running. “I hadn’t done a session,” she said. “I had only written in my room.” Her friends at NYU taught her about the basics of songwriting and production, and she began making her own music as a freshman.