Catty is on a train. Where to? “A studio in the sticks,” she says, deadpan and vivid as ever. “To write and figure out what this next era sounds like, and we haven’t even finished releasing this one. Life is a highway!”
It tracks. After all, her pop persona CATTY isn’t one to sit still. Just a year on from her debut EP ‘Healing Out Of Spite’, she’s back with ‘Bracing For Impact’, a whiplash-sharp follow-up that leans into love, fear, and all the messy feelings in between. “Happy to say I’m heavy on the healing and lighter on the spite,” she grins. “But I would happily go back if challenged.”
If ‘Healing Out Of Spite’ was built from the wreckage, this new chapter is what comes after: the hope, the hang-ups, the haunted feeling that good things might just hurt too. “I was sitting in the studio with Juliette and Nathan, my co-writers across the entire project, and I looked at them and said: ‘Hey, I don’t think I’m going to write a good song ever again.’ Because I built my career on break-up songs, and now I’m about to get real happy. I’ve never successfully written from that place. So this was fun, do we have any wine?”
“I was so scared to fall in love again”
From that uneasy, honest place came ‘Joyride’, the EP’s glam-rock-rush opener. “We started writing from that place of anxiety. It’s so strange that as people we fear good things because we’ve experienced the bad… I was so scared to fall in love again. The last time really did a number on me; it felt a bit like going back into a burning building when you know it’s on fire. But you can’t stop living because you’re scared, you know? You owe yourself a life. So strap in, strap on, brace for impact.”
That phrase, brace for impact, isn’t just the title of the EP; it’s a mantra. A challenge. A spell. And for CATTY, who famously sings like she’s hexing her exes under moonlight, there’s real power in the words we give ourselves. “I did see a TikTok about manifestation the other day and how powerful words are,” she says. “Which I agree with and participate in, but I got a bit freaked out about how often I’m singing about heartbreak. I don’t want to manifest more of that for myself. Maybe my next song will be called ‘I am rich and no one hates me’.”
Much like CATTY, ‘Bracing For Impact’ is never just one thing. It’s chaotic, charming, camp and cathartic, a gothic glitter-bomb of emotion. “Way less outside noise,” she says of the writing process. “The only thing I really thought about while making it is: am I enjoying this? Are my co-writers enjoying this? Are we proud of it? And we all really are. I’d be so happy to sing these songs forever, and that’s something I’m so aware of. If you write and release that song you hate, it might be the one that takes off, and you have to sing it on every stage you get on.”
“What a terrible thing it is to think and think and think”
That fear of putting the ‘wrong’ thing out there nearly cost her what would become her current favourite: the TikTok-beloved closer ‘Man on the Run’. “We had the entire verse, pre, and chorus in one voice memo, and I thought it was shit. Nathan and Juliette texted me after and made me listen to it again. I remember thinking: You stupid bitch, get back into the studio right now and finish that song,” she laughs. “Also a huge lesson in choosing your co-writers — my friends don’t put up with my bullshit, and it’s humbling and gorgeous!”
Elsewhere on the EP, ‘4am (Back in His Bed)’ is the odd one out, a song written not in the present tense of her emotional life, but pulled from something that happened “a whiiiiiile ago”. “I kind of became an experiment, I guess. I hate using that word, because all queer people have to figure out they’re queer some way or another, you know? But I thought this girl was going to dump her boyfriend, and she was never going to dump her boyfriend. None of that matters now because we got the ‘eating me out when you’ve got food at home’ lyric from it. Lots of love to the happy couple.”
Across these six tracks, CATTY wrestles with fear, desire, queerness, power, but also with the creeping dread of growing up. “I feel like so many of my elders have told me to enjoy being young because when you get older, you start to get a lot more nervous about things,” she says. “And I hate it when old people are right. All of a sudden, I’m on a night out thinking: how am I getting home? When I date someone new, I’m thinking: do I see us raising kids together? I’ve lost my ability to throw shit at a wall. What a terrible thing it is to think and think and think.”
Still, there’s plenty of space for theatre and drama, especially with her upcoming appearance at Dork’s Halloween party (hurray!). “I wish I were the kind of person who goes all-in,” she admits. “I always have such big ideas and never give myself enough time for the follow-through. But this year I’m determined. I have a fun little idea for the Dork Halloween show. Can you let me know if I can use fake blood on stage, please?”
It’s not a stretch to imagine her doused in red, backlit in fog, spellcasting into the mic. “One hundred per cent, I’m drawn to the dramatic,” she says. “When I was younger, all I listened to was Stevie Nicks and all I watched was American Horror Story. I don’t know why I said ‘when I was younger’, that literally hasn’t changed.”
Live, Catty becomes something else entirely. “There’s a joke with my listeners that CATTY and Catty are two different people, and they’re right. CATTY gets in the bar fight. Catty’s already run five miles in the other direction.” Onstage, it all makes sense: “I actually prefer the live versions of my songs over the recordings. I don’t tend to revisit stuff once it’s out, so when I get to sing them live, I get transported back to where I was when I wrote them. A live show will always be the most fun thing in the world to me. And to quote my lord and saviour Lady Gaga: surprise, a pop show, and the bitch can sing!”
As for what comes next? “I want people to find pieces of themselves in it,” she says of this new era. “That’s important to me. I was desperate to find a queer artist when I was younger that made sense to me, so I would love to offer people some comfort there. But also… I’m not just a queer artist, you know? Men sing about women all the time, and people fucking love it. Put me on your festival stages!”
CATTY plays Night of the Living Dork IV at Colours, Hoxton on 30th October.
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