Katy Steele Takes Us BTS Of Creating Her New Album 'Big Star'

Perth artists Katy Steele has today released her highly anticipated album, Big Star, filled with pop bangers and Steele's signature voice that keeps everyone coming back for more. 

Big Star is an enormous DIY effort, two years in the making, lovingly co-created by Katy Steele and her partner Graham Mcluskie from their home studio. With a few special guests, including backing singers and bandmates (Sam Maher, Ben McDonald) and Josiah Padmanabam, helping out throughout the process, the entirety of production duties was in Graham's capable hands.

On the new album, Steele said, “The world has changed in so many ways since the day I committed myself to this body of work. The bones of this album started to grow in 2018 when I was spending some time in Scotland, my partner Grammy’s homeland. That’s when the first notion of writing another album came to mind. We were then toying with the idea of recording the bulk ourselves at home in sunny WA. When things were just starting to cook, COVID hit, and everything was delayed by at least two years. The industry, as we knew it, was a totally different landscape. But now we’re finally at the finish line - ready to show the world what we’ve been working on.”

She continues, “We took our time to make every piece of this record sound great. All of the elements that you will experience were lovingly and frustratingly harboured and chiselled over which took hours and hours of care. The whole record was created in our home studio, by me and Graham. The world we live in is forever changing and hopefully this album will find its place in that new world.”

Below, she shares some behind-the-scenes images of creating her new album Big Star. 

A lot of time was spent experimenting, therefore I definitely had time to take a few selfies while Graham threw down some guitar.

We didn't end up using a lot of acoustic on the record, but there is always one lying around to figure out arrangements and chord structures.

When you work from the home studio - clothes are certainly optional!

We worked closely with a friend of ours, Josiah and this pic shows us workshopping a tune.

In my element.

This is a pic of Josiah and Graham figuring out the best tone on his synth. We used a lot of different keyboards and synths on the record, and a lot of stuff never made it onto the record.

More discussions on tones!

Graham rocking the KS merch, laying down some more ideas.

We ended up going to a few different 'real' studios to record drums, backing singers, bass etc, but in this pic here - we are mixing a few tracks. This studio is called Crank and it's run by Lee Buddle, who has insane hearing. He was hearing frequencies we didn't know existed!

We were drinking a lot of beetroot, apple, and ginger juice while we were mixing - I'd just bought a cold press juicer! Graham with the hipster mason jar juice here at Crank!

Selfie with my favourite mic - thanks Neumann!

The record was quite a process but I did, in fact, grow a human and birth one before we released it! This shot was taken at Poons head in Fremantle when we were tracking drums, bass and backing singers. I was 37 weeks pregnant here.

You can stream/download Katy Steele's new album, 'Big Star', here. You can also purchase tickets to her upcoming Aus tour, here.