Katie Dey on Australia, '90s Indie Rock, and Falling Out of Love with the Computer

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: Huge fan of Australian indie-overload genius Katie Dey, whose new album universal will just came out and is one of the most inventive records you'll hear all year. We hopped on a call a few weeks ago and chatted for over an hour for a very hilarious and frequently revealing chat; I very quickly found that Katie is one of those people I could talk to for hours on end, she's extremely insightful and her overall curiosity regarding art and the world around her is exactly what makes her own work so potent in the first place. I think you're going to love reading this one, even if you're just coming to her music for the first time—check it out:

This new record's great, and you're doing stuff on this record that I don't really hear people do that often, which is intriguing to me.
So, I'm curious. What you mean by you don't hear other people doing that stuff?

Well, for example, "unfathomable you/catherine wheel" is almost like digital post-rock, which I was really taken aback by. But also, you're kind of always doing your own thing.
Yeah, I feel like I'm always off-trend, you know? I'm either missing the boat, or I'm too early. I get bored really easily, so if I do a style of music, I find it really hard to keep doing it. That's my downfall—I keep trying to do new stuff. This album is honestly my least adventurous, because I'm pretty explicitly evoking old stuff, which I usually try to avoid. But I was feeling like these bands have been in the air. It's probably a COVID reaction, where people are like, "I want to make music with people"—and I've been craving that as well, because I used to play in punk bands back in the day. Even the worst punk band I was in, was more fun than anything I did by myself. I've just been listening to old stuff, and it's a combination of the fact that I used to be really into '90s indie rock, and I was also a prog rock freak. My favorite bands were Coheed and Cambria and the Mars Volta.

Do you still listen to Coheed?
Oh, yeah, big time.

They're great. When I was younger and they first came out, my attention just wasn't in their direction, and I paid them no mind. Around the mid-to-late 2010s, I checked out a random record of theirs, and I was like, "Holy shit, this is amazing." I love their latest record, and they're one of those bands where, when I talk to other people about stuff that might surprise them, I'm like, "You know what? You might be really into Coheed and Cambria."
It's always possible that someone has that persuasion to be into Coheed and Cambria. There's bands that are similar to Coheed and Cambria that people talk about in the same breath, that do not do it for me whatsoever. But what people feel in Coheed is a real passion for music. The songwriting is just so strong, and like it just soundsLike someone who really, really believes in what they're doing. And I think that's like. So important with music. Like other bands that are similar to that, they're just kind of good, but they just kind of crank out the same stuff, and you feel the passion. Leaving them as they grow into their 30s or whatever.

That's probably the best explanation of why they're good that I've ever heard. I've always been a la carte with prog in general, but the one criticism that it always faces—which I definitely am guilty of making as well—is that it's very technical music with not a ton of humanity behind the virtuosity. But with Coheed, you adjust a couple of dials here and there and it's basically something like Weezer—super poppy and straightforward, and everybody can immediately understand it.
It's a spectrum. You got Weezer on one end, and—who's past the Mars Volta on the other end?

Dream Theater, I guess.
Yeah, Dream Theater. Then there's sweet spots in the middle. My Chemical Romance is in there somewhere. It's a spectrum of dudes singing in high voices, trying to play weird chords, and seeing how far you can go being a guy with a guitar.

It's funny that you say this your least adventurous album because it's inspired by stuff that you grew up on. After reading the press release you sent out, as somebody who listens to a lot of music, I see the influences here for sure. But the average layperson who might have a passing familiarity with My Bloody Valentine, if they heard this record was inspired by that kind of music, they'd be like, "Oh, I'm surprised at how this sounds.
I get what you mean. I very haphazardly wrote the press release. I was just like, "What's a way to sell it?" And it's '90s indie rock about AI. It's just a very quick elevator pitch, but obviously it's my explorations, and it took a long time for these songs to get to that point. They've gone through a lot of mutations. Also, I did record 10 other songs that don't really fit. I wasn't sure which ones would be on which album for a long time. The ones that felt a bit more '90s went on this album, and the ones that are something else went on the other one.

I also feel like people don't give those bands enough credit. People expect a lot of music these days to be formulaic or following a trend. There's a sound, and you want to emulate the sound, and someone's doing the sound well because they want to get on a playlist or whatever. But back in the day, people were just trying shit out. My Bloody Valentine weren't like, "I'm gonna make a shoegaze album." They were like, "How many guitars can I put on one song?" And it just turned out like that. That's the spirit of my approach to music: What can I do?

From assembling the ideas to having what you felt was a finished product, what was the time span for this record?
I first started thinking of it as a chunk of songs a bit over a year ago. But some of the songs are really old. "masterplan" is a song I wrote before I even released any music as Katie Dey, when I was, like, 19 years old. It felt thematically appropriate for that point in the album, and I always thought it was a decent song, so I was like, "Why not re-record it?" It used to be more of a pop-punk song, and now it's a little bit more like Elvis Costello or power-pop. Oh God, I'm so tired of talking about genres. It's so easy to fall into that trap of being like, "This is this category."

Are you somebody who's able to create as you go, or do you have to set time aside to make stuff?
You know the dominoes meme?

Yes.
Okay. The small domino for me was, I live in Australia and I have social anxiety. The bigger domino is, I don't play a lot of shows, and I don't tour because I'm in Australia. It's really hard to tour in Australia. I have a lot of time to spend, and less of a structure than most other musicians have. They have nine months of touring, and then they write an album for a month and record it in a couple weeks. For me, it's all everything all the time.

Why is it hard to tour in Australia?
It's enormous. It's a lot bigger than you think, and the big cities are spread apart really far—you have to fly. There's not that many cities where you'll get an audience. In America, you can get in a car, bus, or van, and you can drive two hours to the next state, where there'll be a capital city where you can play a show, and there'll be a whole scene there. America is a lot more developed as a touring country, and I've just never had the money to go there. I've been handicapped by the fact that I can basically only afford to play shows in Melbourne and Sydney—and even Sydney is kind of pushing it. You'll lose $300 in plane tickets. I've always had that dream, since I was a little kid, to be driving around in a tour bus. I assume it's hard in America to do that now—like, it was hard back then, and it's probably way harder now. But it's at least a possibility, you know?

Whenever I talk to anybody in Australia, I'm always curious to hear them talk about living in Australia. I feel like I'm talking to British people all the time about what it's like in the UK.
You're talking to British people all the time?

At least once or twice a month, I'm interviewing a British person.
Who have you talked to from Australia?

I interviewed Harriet from Hatchie last year. I had Dan from Cut Copy on last year as well.
That's crazy.

It was funny, because Dan was like, "I just went for a swim in the public pool near my house." And I was like, "Yeah, those aren't really so prevalent over here."
What does Dan from Cut Copy do these days? Are they still doing Cut Copy?

They're still doing Cut Copy! The new record was pretty good. He also does a lot of graphic design work.
One difference about being in Australia is, for me, Cut Copy is a band from 2007 and did not continue to be a band [afterwards]. But for America, Cut Copy got big in 2012 or something, and then they were really big there. I don't understand it. But Cut Copy was banging.

What's it like to live in Australia?
I don't know. It kind of sucks. To be honest, I don't go outside much, so to live in Australia is to live in a bedroom and look at a screen like anywhere else. In terms of playing shows, Melbourne is at leastgeared towards being a place where you can play shows. Not a lot of people come to my shows, because I don't actually have a big audience in Australia. Most of my audience is overseas and in America. I have this narcissistic idea, that if I went to America, I could do a sold-out tour because nobody's ever seen me there, so I assume a lot of people would like to see me. But here, I can play a show at a bar in the middle of the city to five people. Nobody comes to these fucking things. That's why I've been trying to get a band together. In Melbourne, there's a big band scene here, a long history of bands. Australia. I don't know. It's a big question.

Well, you had a good answer.
It's really hot.

I figured. How many spiders do you see on occasion?
Zero. There's an ongoing joke from Australians perpetuating the idea that there's heaps of spiders all the time in Australia. I don't remember the last time I've seen a spider. But when I was a teenager, I lived on a farm in the bush, and there were spiders everywhere. You'd walk out of a room, and there'd be five spiders in different spots on the wall—just tarantulas, though. Upper New South Wales, East Coast, and Queensland is a bit more spider-y. But we're down on the south coast, and I think the Antarctic winds maybe scare the spiders away.

Okay. I'll be very honest: My wife is always like, "It'd be cool to go to Australia"—but I really don't like spiders. I just hate looking at them. If it's not a phobia, then I have no idea what it is at this point.
I hate them too. I get really scared when I see them.

I'm glad you relate.
But as long as you stay in the cities, I doubt you'll see a spider. If you go to Sydney, you'll see a lot of cockroaches. If you go to Brisbane, you'll see a lot of cane toads.

I think toads are cool.
Don't touch the cane toads.

Yeah, I actually watched a documentary on cane toads recently.
Recently?

Well, "recently" being "in the last couple years." It was the first thing we watched on New Year's Day 2025. I took something away from it. They're cool, but I won't touch them—I promise.
Are cane toads only in Australia?

I think so, because I remember the documentary being fairly heavy on, "This is mainly an Australia thing."
Yeah, because we introduced them for some reason, and they got out of control.

You've said this record is about falling out of love with the computer. I've been on the computer my whole life. Well, not my whole life, but at a formative age. I got a computer in year five, and we had the internet—a 28 kilobyte dial-up connection. I was a really good student in school up until grade five, and I became just absolute dog shit after that because I was on the computer too much. It was my first obsession that really took over, and I guess it's taken over every single human being on the planet at this point.

I've always been a big proponent of being on the computer. It's where a lot of weird people can feel comfortable and thrive—or, at least, it used to be. I was very optimistic about the idea of being on the computer for a long time, and the last few years, I was holding out hope. I was like, "This is not going too well, but it's still okay." The last few years, I've been like, "This is really bad." Like, atrociously bad, in a way that I almost feel a sense of grief for the amount of human hours that have been taken by these things. Because I'm a human being, I get in all sorts of psychological traps. Whenever I accidentally spend an hour scrolling YouTube Shorts and not see a single thing that inspires me or makes me feel good about humanity, I feel rage and grief for many people in the world.

Because I grew up on the internet, I feel like I have a bit more resistance to dark patterns and these cheap psychological tricks that corporations try to play on us to harvest our data, time, and advertising engagement. But even I, lately, have been really getting trapped by some of this stuff—and that's a separate issue from the AI stuff. Obviously, it's intermingled, but I'm just feeling really doomer-y about it—really negative, and really angry.

Have you ever considered taking a break from being online? It's easier said than done, granted—and a lot of people who say they're doing it usually come back anyway.
Yes, but, the feeling that I feel is that I had a home and it's being demolished. I want to stay there out of spite, almost as much as I have the feeling of, "Fuck this so much, I want to throw my computer in the river." Maybe it's just a lie that I'm telling myself—that I'm just staying here out of spite and anger—and I'm just trapped like the rest of us. This is where I started to make money from the thing that I love, which is music. Like I said, if I play a show down the road or in the city, five people will come to it. I feel like if I quit the internet, I'm basically just giving up on music.

It's funny you describe it as staying out of spite. I relate to that as well. As somebody who's fairly online, I don't like what being online has become. But it's also always been an unstable space—and, like, I know people on here. I'm not gonna leave. Do you expect me to not talk to those people anymore? That would be weird! It's hard to explain to people who aren't online, I'll tell you that much.
Yeah, that's the thing. You stop using it, and then all of a sudden you have no friends.

Let's talk more about the music of your youth—wat you grew up with, and how your listening tastes developed and evolved.
It's pretty standard. The first vinyl record that I ever listened to was Dark Side of the Moon, the obligatory "parents' copy." With that being the foundation, maybe my music makes a bit more sense. We had a CD store called Sanity, and you could go there and listen to stuff. Obviously, the radio was huge. My mom was a big Fleetwood Mac fan. The next step was hearing the band Jet on the radio. I bought the special edition of that CD from Sanity, which had a DVD on it of them playing five songs. I used to watch that on repeat and be like, "I want to be a rock star."

Did Pink Floyd stick with you? I listened to a bunch of their records again recently and was like, "They were one of the greats." They did a lot of really interesting and incredible stuff that pretty much influenced everything.
Yeah. I was hugely into Pink Floyd. The Syd Barrett stuff is wild. You can still listen to that stuff now and be like, "This is way more interesting than so much of what's happening these days." And the later stuff, obviously, is great—when they start writing real songs and stuff. Dark Side of the Moon still slaps. They're a great band. Obviously, I feel like everyone was a bit less into the latest stuff, like The Division Bell. But they're so good. It's crazy the Syd Barrett ones still sound weird. That stuff shouldn't be weird by now.

You started putting out music in the mid-to-late 2010s, and by comparison, the 2020s have definitely a different, darker decade even just within the musical sphere, where some consequences from the 2010s have bore themselves out. I'm curious to hear you reflect on what you've witnessed change over the last 10 years.
Obviously, it's a subjective thing. I feel like I got very lucky early on in 2015, when asdfasdf came out and just happened to get the attention of some people who had some quote-unquote clout. People were like, "Okay, I've got to pay attention to this," and that got me on to Orchid Tapes and Run for Cover. I feel like it's harder for that to happen now. But maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm just old and busted. I've been doing this for 10 years, and people—industry people in particular—if you've been doing something for 10 years and you still have the same project name, they don't give a shit about you. That's just been my experience. You've proven out that, if you were going to be a hit, you would've been a hit by now. They just don't want to give you money or spend their time on you. I don't know if that's 100% true, but that's just what it feels like to me.

Obviously, COVID fucked everything. It utterly devastated the music industry in ways that I feel like people aren't really fully reckoning with. I was about to release Mydata, and I was still on Run for Cover. They were like, "We should organize a tour for you in America." We were in the process of organizing the tour, and then this COVID stuff started happening. I emailed them, "Hey, are you sure we should still do this tour?" They emailed back like, "Yeah, of course. Don't worry about it, it'll blow over. If we have to cancel this tour, something has gone wrong. Massively wrong."

That was a big turning point for me where it just fucked any momentum that that record was going to have. After that, it was all self-releasing, and I didn't play any shows for a long time. It was really fucked up. And like you said, the consequences of the ideas from the 2010s have been bearing themselves out, and some of the dread that I feel is in the album. Have you ever played Cookie Clicker?

I know about the game.
I feel like the world is cookie clicker'ing. There's an inevitable exponential increase, and that logic is in everything now. Everything is getting more and more meaningless, and everything is rage bait. My friend Devi put out a song earlier this year that I mixed and mastered, and randomly it popped off on TikTok. Right now, it has 100 million streams on Spotify, which is insane. She suddenly has a million monthly listeners on Spotify. What really scares me is, you can have that happen—you can be pulling Drake numbers, and the next month, nothing. Nobody continues following an artist from that. It's really fucking scary. It's disturbing. It's a different level of impermanence that's so surreal that it's tough to contemplate, honestly—but it's real.

Maybe it's just my nostalgia and being reactionary, but that's why I've been trying to, in little ways, move further into ways that I are better for fostering community, pushing against the ephemerality of everything. That's why the stuff's not going to be on Spotify. I'm trying my best to push against it and remind people that we had a better thing. Like, it's not just me being nostalgic—it actually was better for people.

How was COVID for you? It does seem like it's one of the all-time "fucked everybody up forever" things, whether or not people are cool with acknowledging it.
So, at the time, I was like, "This is horrendous—but, because of my struggle to leave the house, it's not affecting me too much." Then, a couple of years ago, I went and saw An Unfinished Film, which is about when COVID hit in China—but I didn't know that it was going to be about COVID. Maybe a quarter of the way through the movie, they start getting text messages [about COVID]. It was really emotional for me. It fucked me up, just remembering. It was bad. I think we all kind of repressed it a bit, you know?

Have you seen The Beast?
No, I haven't seen it.

Bertrand Bonello also made Coma around the same time, and Coma is explicitly about COVID. The Beast is about a lot of different things, but it feels very spiritually about COVID to me too. They're both era-defining works. I would highly recommend them.
I don't know if I'm ready for that.

That's fair!
Sometimes I see interviews with people—and this might be a mass cultural oppression thing—where they'd be like, "Our COVID was fine. I just stayed inside and we got sick every now and then." It's like, what? An unbelievable amount of people died.

Yeah, I do feel a little crazy when people say that to me. "I really liked COVID. I got to work a lot on my projects, and I got some time alone." I was in a one-bedroom with ambulances with dead people going by my apartment seven times a day. I didn't love it! But, you know, everybody's different. It's all a matter of perspective at the end of the day. Anyway, what else have you been watching lately?
I've been watching a lot of movies from the '70s. They truly just don't make them like they used to, man. I've been watching a lot of the '70s Pacino stuff that I haven't seen. I'd never seen Dog Day Afternoon. That's an unbelievable movie. I watched And Justice for All.

I love that one.
Crazy movie—the tonal shifts. The part where there's a Black transgender woman that's in jail, and he tells this guy to give something to the judge—and the guy doesn't do it, and she dies because of it. The way that he gets so angry at the guy, it brought me to tears. It was unbelievable.

I watched Network the other night, that's also great. The Hospital, that's a weird one that's also pretty good. I watched The Long Goodbye, that's a great film. I missed a lot of the classics from that era. In terms of recent movies, I liked Digger. I thought it was good.

I was in-between on Digger. I admired it, and it was certainly better than Birdman.
I didn't like Birdman. I was never really an Iñárritu fan.

Did you like The Revenant?
I did. I actually saw Digger because of Tom Cruise. I'm a Tom Cruise head, for some reason. I just love Tom Cruise.

I have a '70s film recommendation for you, if you haven't seen it yet. Have you seen Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman?
No.

I watched it recently. It's really good, and I feel like it's something you'd be totally in line with. Dustin Hoffman, he's certainly a problem in other areas, but it's one of the best performances you'll ever see from him.
Maybe I'll watch it tonight. Fuck it. I've been trying to watch a movie, like, every night.

That's the way to be.
And it's crazy how healthy it feels, paying attention to something for two hours and trying not to do other things. It's like, "Oh, I remember being alive."

Also, at this point TV is built for you not to pay attention to.
Literally everything is.

I know you play video games. Are you playing anything you like?
Yes, me and my partner were playing Suzuki Bakuhatsu, a PS1 game that was never translated to English and has incredible style. Fantastic Plastic Machine did the soundtrack. The cutscenes are still photos of this woman, Suzuki, who's going around just doing random activities. She gets up to a lot of shit, and every now and then something will be ticking, and it's a bomb that you have to defuse. It's a great game. I was playing Alan Wake 2 a little bit. I need to get back to that, because I want to play the new Control game. They're one of the only game developers that really effectively utilizes filmic techniques. The lighting is unbelievable in that game.

I still haven't played the Alan Wake games, but I did play Control and I was really impressed by it.
You'd really like Alan Wake 2. I think you'd have a great time with it. I also had a great time with Rhythm Heaven Groove. That's a banger.

I've been playing Minecraft Dungeons 2.
I heard those games are good.

I'll be honest with you, the first one was better. It had its problems, but it did the "Diablo for babies" thing really well.
Is it a Diablo thing?

Yeah.
For some reason, I thought it was like Dragon Quest Builders.

There is a Minecraft tactics game as well. I'm a big Diablo person. I've put in an unreasonable amount of time on D4.
Hell yeah. I've never played a single Diablo.

They're really good for bite-sized gaming experiences. The way D4 is set up, you can run a dungeon, play for 30 minutes, and then walk away and do something else.
I have a bit of a resistance to Diablo, because a lot of Diablo-esque things have led to a lot of what's really toxic about modern video games—the exponential "numbers go up" type stuff. I'm sure they're really good games, though. I just bought Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, because I think the Wii Sports Resort table tennis game is one of the greatest video games ever made. The new one is basically exactly the same, but it has online multiplayer, which is so, so good. I've been fucking going crazy on the table tennis.