You know a Katy Steele song by the way it feels.
There’s that voice - unmistakable, airborne one moment and cracked open the next. A voice that
can float above a melody before suddenly finding the bruise underneath it. Around it are guitars,
dusty pianos, analogue warmth, strange little synths and melodies that feel as though they’ve
been sitting somewhere in the back of your mind all along.
Katy makes music with its fingerprints still on it.
Nothing scrubbed of its edges. Nothing pretending not to hurt.
Her songs carry the sweetness and sting of something half remembered: sun-warmed vinyl,
lipstick on a wine glass, the hum of an old amplifier, driving home too late with the windows
down. They shimmer, swagger and occasionally stumble through the door at 4am. But beneath all
of it is something Katy has chased for more than twenty years - honesty.
Long before she understood what a career in music was supposed to look like, she was writing
songs.
At nineteen, those songs carried her from Perth bedrooms onto stages around Australia as the
voice and songwriter at the centre of Little Birdy. Their debut album, *BigBigLove*, arrived in 2004
and became part of the fabric of Australian indie music, followed by *Hollywood* and *Confetti*.
There were Gold records, ARIA nominations, international tours, festival stages and songs like
*Beautiful to Me* that became entwined with a particular time in people’s lives.
But Katy has never been particularly interested in standing still.
When Little Birdy stepped away, she left Australia for New York and started again.
New rooms. New collaborators. New sounds.
She spent years writing, recording and pulling apart her ideas about who she was supposed to be
as an artist. That period of experimentation eventually brought her home and into another
incarnation -Katy Steele, solo artist.
Her solo records ‘Human’ and ‘Big Star’ revealed a different landscape: expansive, atmospheric
and fiercely independent. ‘Big Star’, largely built from the ground up in a home studio, carried the
hallmarks that have followed Katy throughout her career -melodies that refuse to leave, a restless
curiosity and that voice, still capable of making something enormous feel strangely intimate.
Then Little Birdy came back.
Twenty-one years after ‘BigBigLove’, the band returned to packed rooms around Australia in
2025, including a sold-out homecoming at Perth’s Astor Theatre, while the anniversary vinyl
release of ‘BigBigLove’ reached #2 on the national vinyl chart.
It could easily have been an exercise in nostalgia.
Instead, it became a reminder that songs have lives of their own.
People had fallen in love to them. Broken up to them. Left home. Had children. Changed cities.
Changed themselves.
Katy had changed too.
And in 2026, she turned the volume down.
‘Undressed’ strips everything back to its bones: a voice, an instrument and a song. A collection of
reimagined Katy Steele and Little Birdy songs alongside carefully chosen covers, the record finds
familiar music in a different light - closer, looser and exposed.
There are no walls of production to hide behind. You can hear fingers against strings, breath
before a line, the grain in her voice.
Songs once dressed for festival stages arrive barefoot.
The project travelled into a successful run of intimate live shows and a special-edition vinyl
release - a physical document of this quieter, more exposed chapter.
More than two decades into making music, Katy seems less interested than ever in what an artist
is ‘supposed’ to be.
Perhaps that’s the thread running through everything she’s made.
‘Change without losing yourself’
After the records, the touring, the reinventions and the noise, she keeps returning to what was
there at the beginning:
The melody.
The words.
The feeling.
The song.
‘And that voice’