Katie Dey
Universal Will
SELF-RELEASED
There’s a specific dissociative feeling that hits after scrolling too long, an unreality to being dropped back into a room you’ve been sitting in for what feels like hours. Eventually, the world starts to feel dulled when it’s not being filtered through blue light and receptor-frying feeds. It’s a feeling that Melbourne-based experimental pop artist Katie Dey must know well. In the music video for “For You,” the opener to her new album Universal Will, she plays guitar in bed underneath an endless hyperreal content feed that literally made me feel dizzy to watch.
Universal Will expands that specific online unheimlich into a full-length treatise. Dey traded her typical hyperpop textures for heavy rock notes of Smashing Pumpkins, Pink Floyd, and My Bloody Valentine for the record, centering influences that have so far been latent in her work. It’s a decidedly pre-internet palette—but these artists’ fascination with ecstatic dissolving is a natural fit. The result is what Dey describes as “an indie rock concept album about falling out of love with the computer.” A striking departure no less assured than her previous releases, Universal Will reckons with the rise of technofascism in the wake of an online coming-of-age.
Dey’s surreal effects and bedroom-pop framework have seen her compared to Alex G, who himself considered the chronically online for the soundtrack of Jane Schoenbrun’s 2021 film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. On “Fearless Zone,” Dey pitches her voice up to a childlike falsetto that could be straight out of DSU or Rocket. Computerwife’s digital preoccupations are another link—specifically to the ties Dey makes between digital and physical intimacy and violence. In “Last Night of the World,” the double-edged sword of finding yourself online dissolves into frenetic, screaming gore. “When it’s drained all from your heart, you'd make an unforgettable view in the place where I could actually see you,” Dey calls, like a glitched-out GLaDOS.
But some of the most interesting moments on Universal Will are when Dey goes acoustic. On “For You,” a churn of sound rains down as she skewers online addiction before it gives way to rapturous, hymnal piano. It’s followed by “Shadow Self,” where the fuzz breaks with swelling strings that end on a cliffhanger. “Angel in the Server Room” craves reality through sensory experience—movement, breathing, the scent of frangipani. Its wistful saxophone feeds directly into “Unfathomable You / Catherine Wheel,” an epic climax that veers from lament into pop miasma. As the fog clears, we’re left with Dey and an acoustic guitar, begging, “I don’t want to change, let me stay the same.”
The title track, which closes the record, complicates this duality: A piano filtered through noise, clicking and breathing, a choir “tangled up in wires.” It’s as if Dey is offering an alternative to digital malaise in the form of warm, organic sound—if only we’re willing to take it.
