It is hard to imagine a more timely album than ‘mydata,’ the fourth solo release from the Melbourne-based pop artist Katie Dey. Her unique sound, which blends noisy synths with art-pop poetics, has felt ahead of the curve, but in this moment of quarantine-strained relationships and touch-starved isolation, ‘mydata’ feels even more prescient than ever. Dey’s crackling synths and pining vocals aren’t satisfied with the mundane question of whether love is possible over the internet. Instead, ‘mydata’ wonders whether love is a solution at all or if it’s just another wonderful, painful complication.

“It's pretty explicitly about an internet relationship, which can be precisely as meaningful as a relationship that’s physical,” Dey says. “Because a long distance relationship is obviously physical too, in a sense. It's physically felt in the body.” In other words, whether a relationship is sexual, romantic, or totally platonic in nature, distance doesn’t erase physicality, it changes it. One pang exchanged for another.

Dey didn’t set out to write an album about long distance affection, though. Like past projects, the soul of the album revealed it to herself in the middle of her songwriting process. “You usually learn so much in the process of starting a thing that it morphs along the way,” Dey explains, noting that this is in line with her normal process. Like past her albums, ‘mydata’ started out very scattershot and formless, but came together in pieces over a long period of time. “Old songs became relevant again, and things started to click into place.”

For all of her record’s timeliness, Dey emphasizes that she didn’t write ‘mydata’ as a response to COVID-19, but as a testament to the truth of her life and the lives of many others. “I mean it’s just how I’ve always lived. It’s how a lot of marginalized people have always lived,” she says.

Even before quarantine, more people than ever build their lives together online. And when so much of our relationships exist through corporate owned social media, video calls of questionable privacy, and chat logs backed up on some distant server, love gets even more complicated.

“So much of my life is just on the internet. So many private, intimate moments. You can download this enormous chat log you have with someone, and it will be like 20MB. But that’s not where the relationship is. That’s not where it’s contained.” - Katie Dey.