Devon Again turns teenage hero worship into pop with a rock backbone

When we speak over the summer, it’s only just been announced that she’s set to join Olivia Rodrigo on her Unraveled Tour — where she’s currently performing — and industry chatter has confirmed she’s the official next signee of Dan Nigro’s Amusement Records imprint. It all feels a bit like an anointing to the outside world. The chatter is about to break containment. In a way, with the viral success of her songs “Skittles” and “Cherry Cola,” it already has.

Johanningmeier’s slice of life is still, for now, as it always was, coming home to her roommates and doing lots of quintessentially adolescent hanging around. The main differences being that she now takes lots of meetings in fancy record label offices and has dinner with Chappell Roan – but more on that later. Whatever sea changes are yet to come haven’t crashed on her shores quite yet. She’s savouring the time she has left.

“One of [my friends] asked me, ‘Are you scared of being famous?’ I was like, ‘Damn, why would you even ask me that?!’ But she was like, ‘You really should think about it,’” Johanningmeier says. At the time, she thought they were crazy. As the industry stretches out in front of her, she’s starting to take the point.

“I’ve been out in public with Olivia [Rodrigo] a few times, and it definitely sends me into this spiral of what the fuck is going on,” she continues. “I think it's scary because it is like a different reality than the one that I've known my whole life, and I'm not in it yet. But I'm near it, you know? Even with someone like Olivia, her reality is so different than mine, but mine is already so different than it used to be.”

Born in Denver, 25-year-old Johanningmeier describes her childhood as being raised all over — “We moved a grillion times,” she tells me — but still considers Colorado home. If she had to name the place more specifically, it would actually be her friends’ parents’ houses dotted around the city, the people who have carried her through everything from familial battles with addiction to her now-expanding public persona. Even amidst her move to L.A., even as the time spent away from Denver gets longer, those old friends, she says, are still the ones who know her best. 

As a kid, Johanningmeier joined choirs and came up on Hayley Williams. (There may or may not have been a fan page). She started writing songs because she wanted to sound like her idol. The goal, at least as a teen, was to make it to the University of Southern California’s famed popular music program. She didn’t get in, though she quickly realised she wouldn’t have been able to pay for it even if she had. But her rejection from the program didn’t mean, to her, the total loss of L.A. She just knew she’d have to get there a different way. So in 2019, she packed her things and went West, settling in a communal living facility for artists, all in their 20s and striving.

When the pandemic hit, she then found herself living in a garage. To stave off boredom, she started writing and recording her own songs over other people’s beats on TikTok. One eventually went viral, and things snowballed. Managers and production partners entered the mix (including Jon Buscema, who has stayed with her since and also produced for Nigro-verse icons like Conan Gray), and by 2021, she released her first track, the bedroom-pop tinged “Suburbia.”

“Up until then, anything I had made was alone on a guitar,” she says. “At one point, I thought I was gonna be a producer, but then I was like, This shit’s too hard.”

Those early singles, from “Suburbia” through to the 2022 EP PEE 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 In Order 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 In Order 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 In Order process. “I don’t listen to much pop music, but I love making 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.”

Now, that sound is currently travelling to stadiums across America alongside Olivia Rodrigo. Johanningmeier still barely remembers where she was when she got the call, but she does remember crying. “There were a lot of talks about it. I remember getting dinner with Olivia and a friend, and she was like, ‘We’re going on tour together. Is it confirmed?’ At the time, I had no idea, I didn’t know what to say. I just remember this whole saga of waiting to see if it would get confirmed and feeling like it was going to be life changing if it ended up happening,” she says. Indeed, in all likelihood, her next lap around those arenas could be with herself as the headline act.