EP Review: Destined for Loneliness

Calling your debut Destined for Loneliness certainly saves on small talk. Tāmaki Makaurau songwriter and producer Katie-Lee arrives with a title that sounds like a verdict and a seven-track EP intent on overturning it. Due in a week or so, it wraps guitar-led songwriting in nostalgic synths, layered harmonies and atmospheric detail: soft furnishings, sharp feelings. Loneliness isn’t the selling point. Finding someone who recognises it is.

I usually reach for the exit when someone says, ‘heart on their sleeve’. Here, it’s more a bandage than a plaster. And we’re ripping it off. Literally. “I’m just picking at a scab and I’m making it worse / I’m so unaware of the damage and hurt”. Picking At A Scab opens with a mic coming to life, then cuts straight to the nerve: brief, poignant words against drone, guitars and synths. There’s a hint of Reznor, minus quite so much desperation. No grand entrance; just an exposed wire.

The title track turns that exposure into an oddly catchy outsider’s lullaby, a badge nobody particularly wanted to earn. Destined for Loneliness stacks reasons, excuses and uncomfortable realities into a paean to growing up different. As a former outsider myself (weren’t we all, once?), I recognise the cold draught. Belonging looks easy until you’re the one outside.

On Strangers, that distance moves indoors. Katie-Lee describes a falling-out with someone they loved: communication breaks down, resentment makes itself comfortable, and familiarity slips away. Not heartbreak by numbers, but the unnerving business of losing the shared language before you lose the person.

Alive pushes forward bravely; Naked and Feel It All make vulnerability part of daring to try. Naked, in particular, holds all the anxiety of indecision and the fear of failure:

“I’m feeling like a fraud
I’m clawing at the walls
I had you where I wanted
But I didn’t want it all”

“I’m feeling like a fake
Confidence is a mistake
With intimacy on the plate
I think I want you babe”

Written after a night out, it’s a bedroom confession in real time: emotional intimacy, it turns out, is easier than the physical kind. The real craving was acceptance.

“I’ll open up cause I want you to stay
You just wanna f*ck but I’m f*cked in my brain
Here’s me being honest cause I can’t be
Naked”

Then Changing Is Lonely presents the bill. Leaving an old lifestyle behind to pursue music means accepting that personal growth comes without a complimentary support crew. Isolation and self-doubt precede clarity. So much for the motivational-poster version of reinvention: become your best self, remember to hydrate. Katie-Lee stays with the awkward middle, where choosing what matters can cost you the acceptance you once relied on.

Listening, I kept circling back to Supertramp’s Hide In Your Shell and NIN’s Hurt. Katie-Lee sounds like neither, but occupies some of the emotional ground between them. Camouflage is clearly not on the agenda. Their release page frames the EP around disconnection and the desire to invite others in: solitude as a meeting place, not a personality accessory. For all its shut-curtain imagery, this is music looking for company.

If I had to hang my hat on a style, I’d say these songs lean towards Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, Boygenius and Gigi Perez, all of whom I’m a massive fan of. The lyrics are whip-smart, considered and sometimes crushing. “…baggage in the closet / Even the skeletons don’t want it” opens Alive, and the song is full of cleverly reworked clichés like this. Smart and effective.

Katie-Lee handles the songwriting and production, shaping a self-produced debut rather than waiting for someone else to gift-wrap an artistic identity. The production is every bit as sharp as the lyrics. A handful of collaborators helped along the way: Maude Minnie Morris lent a hand on the EP’s production, alongside other musical and technical contributors, while Katie-Lee filmed and edited the Changing Is Lonely video, with handheld footage credited to Leanne Webster. DIY, in other words, as a working practice rather than a press-release accessory. Acknowledging the help makes the achievement more credible, not less impressive. Katie-Lee has steered this debut from private uncertainty to finished work, and that takes more than a compelling mood board. For a record called Destined for Loneliness, it’s a pointedly sociable send-off. Katie-Lee has made something worth celebrating, then invited everyone round. Loneliness gets the title, not the last word.

Katie-Lee launches the EP at Big Fan on Friday 13 November, 2026, and you’re all invited. Wear your Halloween costumes: dress up to hear someone drop the disguise.