Stenzel is 23, about to turn 24, with a single called 'KILLSWITCH' landing today alongside her album announcement. She was born in Ibiza in 2002 and was raised mostly in Antigua. She speaks English, German and Spanish. Her stage name joins two elements from the periodic table - Au for gold, Ra for radium - which looks, on the page, a bit like chemistry GCSE revision, though the conceit has literary roots. "My artist name actually came from a Wattpad fan fiction about a minor Lord of the Rings character," she says, "so I'm a huge fan of Tolkien's work." One would usually meet that kind of admission in interviews with a certain eye-rolling diplomacy. The difference with Stenzel is that she doesn't pretend it's anything other than the literal truth. This isn’t padding a personality - it’s actually who she is. "I also love Studio Ghibli movies and anime in general. I think it's so much more fun to play with ideas that seem out of reality.”

“I'm also watching One Piece at the moment,” she continues. “I got to sing a song on the soundtrack for the live action's season two. I've been trying to channel that Luffy positive attitude about my career, and now I also want to be king of the pirates. I think you might actually have to want to do this as much as Luffy wants to be king of the pirates. Literally. That's what it takes." Certainly, the super stretchy flexibility wouldn’t hurt.

This is, whatever else, a relatively rare thing in modern pop: an artist whose nerd credentials are not grafted-on talking points but, unambiguously, her actual personality. "Basically," she says, "I'm a huge nerd."

'heartcore''s central conceit - a dungeon crawler that doubles as a recovery narrative - could have sounded unbearably twee in another artist's hands; one thinks of the long, mostly exhausting history of post-streaming records dressed up in capital-L lore. Stenzel's version works, partly, because the metaphor is one she plainly takes seriously, and more importantly, because the lived material underneath it is real. "I grew up playing video games, I've always been very inspired by fictional worlds, and the crossover of tech and fantasy," she says. "What I found was especially interesting about modelling this album after a hero's journey vibe was that it really just reflects all the levels of life."

It was also, she explains, a way to keep going when the question of what "going" even meant was genuinely open. "This album was a really deep emotional process for me. I think my major goal was to figure out a way for the music to just come out! And just to grow as a person and reconstruct my fundamental ways of thinking about my career, to be honest. Like I used to think I was nothing without my career, and I realised how dangerous that was, so I really needed to reconstruct what it meant to be an artist to make it fun and enjoyable again."

There is an entire subgenre of interview in which the subject testifies about finally enjoying things again, and the tone can be suspect; a recovered-wellness glow that may or may not prove durable. Stenzel sounds, on balance, more like someone mid-repair than performing it. "I had really struggled the past few years to find music as a job enjoyable," she says. "I always love creating, but man, sticking with it in the hard times, things can get really tough… reconstructing how I felt about my career and getting a healthier perspective on my identity was really important. It's hard when you start doing this at a very young age."

Asked whether she had come close to leaving music altogether, she does not overclaim. "I think there were definitely moments where I thought 'Wow, I love world building and creating and music and singing', but having to do it under these circumstances with the pressure and the whole industry part of it can really drain the joy out of the process. But at the end of the day, I simply love it too much to give it up, and even when it got dark, my whole ambition… the one thing that was on my mind the whole time was how can I release music again. I think to turn your passion, your hobby, into a job, you really have to fight to keep loving it."

'KILLSWITCH' itself, in keeping with the video-game framing, is the opening level. "I feel like it just comes in with a bang," she says, "and is kind of in your face, here we go, thrown into the battle." On first listen, it is a neat précis of the register 'heartcore' is going to occupy: a grungy, atmospheric open that folds, seemingly out of nowhere, into a deceptively sweet chorus about watching a betrayer vanish like magic. She is not, though, under any illusion that a three-minute track can do the work of a year in therapy. Healing is a process that the rest of the album quite insistently spends time on.

The range, she reckons, will be the surprise. "It definitely keeps developing sound-wise as it goes,” she explains. “There's a lot of 'sister songs' I like to call them - songs that connect to each other. But I wouldn't say any 2 sound the same." 'heartcore' has been pitched as a blend of ethereal pop, electronica, 8-bit hyperpop and rock; on the evidence of what is out so far, the word that keeps arriving is "fluent" - a pop-nerd omnivorousness you tend to associate with artists a decade her senior, delivered without the twitchy genre-tourist anxiety that usually accompanies it.

What keeps the concept from floating off into cosplay is that the songs underneath it are about particular things. "Because this album follows a hero's journey," she says, "there's always that part of the story where the protagonist ends up going through a transformation and atonement caused by revelations from being in a dark place. So that part of the album means the most to me. It's kind of the depression arc. There's a song during that arc where I got to feature my parents and my siblings, which means so so much." The pragmatic reading that an artist whose teenage career was derailed by people she trusted has made an album whose emotional centre of gravity is a track sung with her family feels hard to resist.

She is keen, too, on the unglamorous work of inner-child rehab, which in her telling turns out rather sweeter than it normally does. "I finally confronted a lot of things in my past that were not serving me anymore, mentally,” she reveals. “A lot of roadblocks I had, a lot of guilt I felt towards myself for, I don't know, feeling different in the world? And I finally felt like I was able to reconnect with my inner child in a way that was liberating."

The live plan is, for the moment, sketched rather than fully announced. She has shows in May and "a few more shows yet to be announced, maybe more writing and music, and more lore to be revealed!" Bringing the 'heartcore' world onto a stage is, she says, a collaborative exercise rather than a set-piece: "The songs definitely evolve when they go from the studio to the stage, and having fans there expands the world by bringing them into the dungeon with me."

Those fans have a name. "I have a very tight-knit community of listeners called Green Beans," she says. "We have a Discord server where we do events and play video games together, and I also stream on Twitch! Full nerdom. Everyone's invited."

There is, by the standards of the digital era, something faintly anachronistic about all of this. The dominant mode of mainstream pop in 2026 is to brand outwards, chase territories, and treat an audience as a market segment. Au/Ra, by contrast, is running a small, specific online hobby club with an album as its organising purpose. It’s also, almost certainly, a large part of the reason she has an album at all. When the heart is true, pop will always prevail.

Au/Ra's debut album 'heartcore' is out 26th June.