here's what i wrote in my pathetic haphazard excuse for a "press release" that i mass BCC'd to a bunch of people at 1AM AEDT on october 10th 2026:

hello dear writer or industry person or media outlet or friend (forgive me),

i’m announcing my new album “universal will” today, release date is november 6th. pre-orders will go up now. i’m also releasing a single called “for you” with a music video out today. the album will be exclusive to bandcamp for the time being. please excuse my unprofessionalism and for the mass unpersonalized email. i'm going through a lot right now and so are you probably.

"for you" music video

pre-order link

in lieu of a traditional album bio writeup (can’t afford a writer) i’ve decided to write a letter to you (and the other people BCC’d). i’m writing this a few hours before i send it. my body and mind hurt. i hope you are feeling OK. press releases must get really boring to read all day. all the language makes me sick. i just made spaghetti and meatballs. anyway hopefully there will be a few pull quotes in there if you choose to write about it. a quick summary and then i’ll go more into detail:

“universal will” is katie dey’s 7th full length album, her 3rd self-released, pre-orders are up now exclusively on bandcamp, release date november 6th 2026. the first single is “for you” and the video is up now on youtube. it’s an indie rock concept album about falling out of love with the computer, or, a bedroom prog epic about the singularity, or, a delusional 32 year old woman shoegazing her way through a mental breakdown, or, a natural born child of the world wide web’s screaming hate letter to the technofascists destroying the world at our expense, etc. i could go on.

"for you" is the first single, out now. it's about being online and how people and corporations try do things on our behalf, the flattening and desensitizing of information, the feeling of being watched and catered to in a way that you don't want and did not ask for but don't know how to stop. the video is supposed to be a sort of hallucinatory simulated scrolling experience. i was screenshotting things for weeks and compiling them and making connections between the images and the lyrics... this was a borderline psychosis inducing process. i hope it has a certain "smoke the whole pack" quality but for scrolling social media.

aforementioned detail if you want it: i made the album by myself in my bedroom (in accordance with the regulations of the Bedroom Pop Union (BPU)) over the last year and a half while in the meantime going actually insane and having the worst time of my life. stylistically i was trying to channel some of the music that was foundational to me as a teenager but never really explored much in my own work: my bloody valentine, smashing pumpkins, unwound, the mars volta, sleater-kinney, pink floyd, built to spill, sunny day real estate, the wrens, sparklehorse etc. i wanted to tie this aesthetic with modern ideas & feelings. 90s indie rock bands never talked about being on their phone or whatever (they didn’t have phone back then). inevitably my attempts at imitation end up failing and morphing into their own thing, which is why it also sounds wrong and weird. i have been interested in ideas of um “reality” i guess and how it’s becoming harder to tell “what’s what”. i was preoccupied with trying to make the listener second guess what they’re really hearing, reminding them of all the potential for trickery and sneakiness in art, taking them out of their imagination and forcing them to re-evaluate it. i think now more than ever is a good time to be flexing our reality detection muscles. who knows how successful i was in this endeavour (for you to decide, dear reader).

the album is a variety of things including but not limited to: rock songs about the end of the world in the long tradition of paranoid musicians in troubled times, a semi-conceptual story about the increasingly frightening possibility of a world where the people responsible for the technology intended to “improve our lives” (for our benefit, so they say) leads to or directly causes the end of the human race, a parallel story about an individual who becomes so intertwined with computer that they struggle to tell themselves apart from the version of themselves that they constructed on computer, frangipanis, and things i’m not able to see clearly from my perspective (this is why hiring a writer would be useful).

the songs are approximately about (in no particular order): looking at social media too much & flattening of information (image of dinner, image of massacre, image of puppy), jungian shadow selves & the conditions that lead to developing schizoid personalities, memory loss, relating more to a chatbot than a person, the feeling of being trapped by inevitability and mechanical decay, the seeming impossibility of real communication between people, getting addicted to gambling (on dogs, on horses, on people, on yourself), not remembering “who you really are” or not knowing what that is supposed to mean, that new york times article about a boy who used chatgpt to assist in his suicide, what it felt like to see people on twitter memeing and quote rt dunking on a young trans girl who publically killed herself, the possibility that if we were to create real sentient artificial intelligence we would probably torture it to death before it does the same to us (or that maybe it is us, we’re the thing being tortured already), & what it might feel like if the world actually does end or the singularity does happen. probably would feel bad.

that’s all i can think to write right now. if you want to ask any questions or set up an interview feel free to reply. thanks for your time, hope you’re doing well <3 - katie

any enquiries or comments etc: k80dey@gmail.com