Delilah Holliday details debut album, Fat Cat

Known for leading punk band Skinny Girl Diet, Holliday's new work is a "new wave recession-pop" concept album that tackles themes of grief, is a new wave recession-pop concept record. "Formless" arrives as the first preview, of which Holliday describes as, “a sonic state of psychological and spiritual disintegration, introducing the inability to control external power structures versus the internal need to find meaning.”

Fat Cat was written during a period of significant grief for Holliday, with much of it coming together while she was pregnant and struggling with mental illness. She experienced the deaths of her uncle Simon – whose mentorship she says made her a musician – her Nana, a Windrush generation emigrant from Jamaica, and one month later she suffered the loss of her child.

“Before last year, I thought I understood grief through empathy, but I had never truly experienced its full emotional weight,” she explains of her experiences. “I had endured loss before, but nothing prepared me for the devastation of losing multiple foundational figures in my family within such a short period.

"It shattered me. Without my support network, I truly do not know if I would still be here. Living with chronic mental illness already requires daily endurance, and this level of pain pushed me to my absolute limit. Rather than allowing grief to destroy me, I transmuted that pain into Fat Cat.

"It’s semi-autobiographical, it critiques modern society and the capitalist institutions we did not create yet are forced to navigate simply by being born into them. I wanted to transform my personal tragedy into a social commentary, using individual pain to examine collective struggle and inequality, as well as the search for faith, meaning, and survival.”

Fat Cat artwork

Fat Cat tracklist

"Fat Cat"
"Loop 7"
"Formless"
"Dream in Colour"
"Dred"
"God Willing"
"Free State"
"Odyssey"
"This Is"
"Love Bite"
"Skyline"