Delilah Holliday – Formless
Delilah Holliday has announced Fat Cat, her debut album, due August 28 via One Little Independent Records. She’s been a fixture of the North London DIY scene through punk outfit Skinny Girl Diet and her 2023 mixtape Invaluable; this record marks a significant shift in both sound and scope. Produced with Raphael Ninot as creative partner and Liam Howe of Sneaker Pimps, it moves through downtempo electronics, trip-hop, and fragmented hyperpop, with Holliday describing the overall frame as “recession-pop.” The video for lead single “Formless” was co-directed by Holliday and Ursula Holliday.
The album was written during a period of compounded loss: within a short span, Holliday lost her uncle Simon, who she credits as instrumental to her becoming a musician; her Nana, a Windrush-generation matriarch from Jamaica; and her unborn child. She’s spoken about the record as an act of transmutation. “Before last year, I thought I understood grief through empathy, but I had never truly experienced its full emotional weight,” she says. “Rather than allowing grief to destroy me, I transmuted that pain into Fat Cat.”
“Formless” is built around the tension of identity collapse: Holliday describes it as moving from loss of control toward something like spiritual acceptance, its refrain “I am everything and I am nothing” landing at the centre of that shift. The production is deliberately unmoored, Howe’s influence audible in the way the track floats without quite dissolving. What strikes me is how the song holds that instability without reaching for resolution: it sits in the disorientation rather than narrating a way out of it, which takes more confidence than it might appear.
Fat Cat is out August 28 via One Little Independent Records.
