Katie Noir has recently released her wonderfully satirical new single I Prefer Jason, making for an irresistible pop hit that I just can’t stop listening to. I simply had to find out more about Katie and what the future holds for her and her musical career – learn more about the story behind the track and much, much more below!

By Jane Howkins

You have a new single that has just come out titled I Prefer Jason. What can you tell us about the track?

I Prefer Jason started from a very silly thought that made me laugh, and then it slowly turned into a full cinematic scene in my head. I imagined myself at this wedding for Taylor and Travis, surrounded by glamour and spectacle and somehow becoming far more interested in Jason than in the actual main event. The song is playful and exaggerated, but there is something personal underneath the joke. I think I am naturally drawn to people who feel warm, funny and unpolished, rather than perfectly presented. So while the song is definitely me having fun and being a little ridiculous, it is also about preferring authenticity over spectacle.

It was refreshing to write because not every song has to begin with heartbreak or an existential crisis. Sometimes I apparently just need to interrupt a celebrity wedding and choose the wrong brother.

How has the reception to I Prefer Jason been so far? Both in terms of your fans and the critics? All good I would hope?

Honestly, the reception has been much warmer than I expected. I knew the song was funny to me, but humour is always a little risky because you never know whether other people will hear the joke the way you intended it. Thankfully, listeners seem to understand that it is affectionate satire rather than anything cruel. A lot of people have reacted to the contrast between the glamorous wedding and my completely misplaced focus on Jason. I think they also enjoyed seeing a lighter and more mischievous side of me after so much emotionally heavy music.

Some listeners have told me that the song feels like a tiny comedy film, which makes me very happy because that is exactly how it existed in my head while I was writing it. The critical response has also been genuinely encouraging. Reviewers have highlighted the cinematic storytelling, the dry humour, the rapid lyrical delivery and the way the song combines silliness with warmth. I was especially pleased that several people understood it as evidence that I can move between vulnerable writing and playful satire without becoming a completely different artist. So yes, all good so far – suspiciously good actually. I am still waiting for Travis to file an official complaint.

I Prefer Jason is the lead single from your upcoming project The Aftermath EP. What can you tell us about the project?

The Aftermath EP is really about what happened after I opened the door. I originally thought finishing and releasing What Is Unseen Still Exists would bring that emotional journey to a natural end, but making something so private public created an entirely new set of feelings and experiences. People responded, new relationships formed, old ones changed and vulnerability was often followed by embarrassment, doubt or the desire to hide again. I kept writing because life had already continued beyond the final song.

The EP has fifteen tracks and moves through five chapters: Reality, Vulnerability, Healing, Loyalty and Acceptance. It begins by reacting to expectation and the strange realities of releasing music, then becomes much more exposed. There are songs about regretting honesty, broken reassurance, friendship, grief, betrayal, creativity and the uncomfortable question of what it costs to keep transforming pain into something useful. I Prefer Jason shows the more playful side of the project, but the EP is not entirely light. It can be sarcastic and ridiculous in one moment, then deeply personal in the next. That contrast feels honest to me because humour is one of the ways I survive discomfort. I do not spend every hour dramatically staring through a rain-covered window, occasionally I attend an imaginary celebrity wedding and choose the wrong brother. The debut album was the private world becoming sound. The EP is what happened when that world became public and the outside world answered.

Do you have any more singles planned for release soon from the record?

Yes, there are three more singles planned before the full EP arrives. Vulnerability Hangover will be released on August 10th. It is about the emotional crash after opening up, when the brave moment is over and you suddenly begin questioning every word you shared.

Hypocrite follows on August 17th. That song is written almost like an emotional courtroom. It begins with me judging somebody else’s contradictions, but gradually becomes much less comfortable when I realise I may have committed some of the same emotional crimes myself.

Then Abandoned will be released on August 31st. It is probably the darkest of the upcoming singles because it begins with the feeling of being left behind by other people, but eventually turns inward. The most painful question becomes whether I also abandoned myself while I was so busy trying to hold everybody else together.

The complete fifteen-track project, What Is Unseen Still Exists — The Aftermath EP, will then be released on September 7, 2026. I like that the singles reveal very different parts of it: I Prefer Jason is playful and absurd, while the next releases move much more deeply into vulnerability, self-reflection and acceptance. By the time the full EP arrives, listeners will hopefully understand that the aftermath can be funny, painful and slightly chaotic all at once.

You also released an album this year titled What Is Unseen Still Exists, which contained 23 songs – impressive for a debut! Why did you release so many tracks on the record and what can you tell us about the album?

Twenty-three sounds excessive when you say it out loud and perhaps it was, but the album was never designed as a collection of unrelated songs. It was one continuous inner world and every track held a different room, relationship, fear or part of my life. Removing several songs simply to make the debut look more conventional would have made the story feel dishonest and incomplete.

The number 23 also became meaningful inside the project itself. It appears throughout the album almost like a thread connecting everything and eventually became a song of its own, Number 23. That track looks back at the roads, friendships, hospital corridors, late nights, rooms and emotions from the rest of the record and asks whether they were random events or parts of one larger pattern. The album begins with Bitches’ Road, where kindness has become exhausted and sarcasm starts functioning as protection. From there, it moves through friendship, love, overthinking, university life, my dorm, hospital experiences, relapse, music and the people who became emotional landmarks for me.

Some songs are playful, some are very exposed and some probably reveal more than I realised at the time. I think of the 23 songs as one story rather than 23 separate attempts to attract attention. It was my first public statement as Katie Noir, so I did not want to introduce only the easiest or most polished fragments of myself. I wanted the whole hidden world to exist outside me at least once – even the inconveniently long version.

It’s also impressive that you already have another EP on the way so soon after your album release! What is your writing process like? You must be fast!

I probably am fast, but not because I sit down with a plan to produce as many songs as possible. Writing is more like an emotional valve for me. When something becomes too loud in my head, I need somewhere to put it and very often it becomes a song. After the debut album was released, a strange amount of pressure suddenly fell onto me. I had always been very introverted, so being seen, discussed and interpreted by so many people was exciting, but also overwhelming. At the same time, there was stress in some of my friendships and all of that created another emotional wave that I could not simply ignore.

The Aftermath EP really came from letting that pressure out. When I start overthinking, the words often arrive very quickly. Sometimes an entire song can appear in one evening because the feeling is already fully formed and just needs somewhere to go. Other songs take longer because I keep returning to them, changing lines and understanding the emotion differently each time. The more personal a song is, the more likely I am to revisit it until it feels completely honest. Most of what I write is autobiographical, although I Prefer Jason is obviously one of the more imaginative exceptions. I rarely choose a subject because I think it would make a good song. Something happens to me, affects me deeply and then naturally becomes one.

So yes, I write quickly, but mostly because life apparently refuses to stop giving me material. Perhaps York Calling should be slightly careful with the remaining questions. They may end up in a song one day.

You’re from Germany. What is the music scene like in your local area?

That is actually a slightly funny question for me, because I am not really connected to a local music scene at all. My private life in Germany is mostly university, medicine and family. Katie Noir exists almost entirely online. The people who listen to the music, write about it, support it or become part of its story are often in completely different countries, so the project feels much more international than local. Music did not enter my life through a local scene either.

I started piano lessons when I was eleven and that was probably the first time I understood that emotions could exist in sound without needing to be explained in ordinary sentences. I did not have a piano at home though, and I became more interested in creating my own melodies than only playing music written by other people. So I began asking my parents for music software with the seriousness of a child presenting a business proposal. For my twelfth birthday, my father gave me the digital audio workstation I had chosen and from there I taught myself privately through instinct, experimentation and a great number of mistakes. There were no local musicians around me, no scene to introduce me to people and no public ambition.

Music was simply the private place where everything inside me could go. I am also naturally quite introverted and I have never been the person constantly attending events, meeting musicians or trying to become part of a physical scene. I created the music quietly in my own world and then released it onto the internet, where it somehow began travelling much farther than I did. So I probably cannot give you a very authoritative report on my local music community. I may live in Germany, but artistically I seem to live somewhere between my dorm room, Spotify, YouTube and several emotionally intense conversations with people across the world.

What/who would you say are your main musical influences? What have you been listening to recently?

I am slightly secretive about direct musical influences, partly because I would rather people listen to the songs without immediately placing them beside somebody else’s work. Once you name an artist, every lyric, rhythm or emotional choice can suddenly be treated as evidence of imitation, even when your own voice developed from a much wider collection of experiences. What influences me most is not necessarily a particular sound. I am drawn to artists who can make pain intelligent, turn uncomfortable honesty into art and use humour without weakening the emotion underneath it.

I admire writing that can be vulnerable, sharp, self-aware and slightly dangerous at the same time. There is one person whose work affected me very deeply lyrically, although I have never met him and I am not ready to name him publicly. I left some clues in Someone I Never Met, which appears on The Aftermath EP. That song is probably the closest I will come to answering the question directly for now. Recently, I have honestly spent more time inside my own music than following one particular release or artist. When I am writing intensely, I sometimes avoid listening too closely to other music because I want to hear what is developing naturally inside my own head.

So this may be a wonderfully unhelpful answer, but perhaps listeners can treat it as a small mystery.

Are there any plans for a UK tour anytime soon? If so, what can your fans expect from one of your gigs?

At the moment, there are no plans for a UK tour or any tour really. The biggest reason is anonymity. Katie Noir was created so that I could let the music become visible without making my entire private life public. I have always preferred privacy, anonymity and the freedom to observe without constantly feeling observed myself. Releasing emotional music already required me to cross a very large personal boundary and performing live would mean crossing another one in a much more physical and immediate way. The anonymity is not a gimmick or a mysterious costume. It is what allows me to be as honest as I am in the songs while still protecting the person who has to continue living after the music ends.

The emotions, stories and relationships are real, but I do not believe that releasing them means the public should automatically receive access to my face, my everyday life or every private part of me. I am also still a medical student and medicine is not simply a practical backup plan beside music. It is my other great passion and I want to become a neurosurgeon. For now, that is where much of my time, focus and future still belong. I never say never, because life has already surprised me too often for that. Perhaps one day I will find a way to bring the songs into a live space without sacrificing the privacy that made Katie Noir possible. But right now, I want to keep creating music online while concentrating on my path through medicine. So for the moment, the music may travel more than I do.

Any last words for the fans?

I think I have reached a point where music no longer feels like something I can simply put back inside myself. Once the songs became public and people began finding their own memories, fears and relationships inside them, the project started belonging to more than just me. That is probably my own version of the point of no return, not in a tragic sense, but in the sense that I now understand why I want to keep going. The most important thing to me is not numbers or attention. It is knowing that somebody genuinely felt a lyric. Whenever a listener tells me that a song understood something they could not explain themselves, that means more to me than any statistic ever could. Those conversations remind me that being emotionally honest was worth the discomfort.

I am always happy to talk with listeners as well. Katie Noir may be anonymous, but I never wanted the project to feel distant or untouchable. I love hearing what people found in the songs, even when their interpretation is completely different from what I originally intended. Sometimes listeners explain my own lyrics back to me better than I could. For anyone who wants to understand more about where all of this came from, I also wrote an autobiographical essay called Where My Inner World Becomes Sound. It tells the story behind the music, the piano lessons, the private years of creating and the slightly improbable decision to finally let anybody hear it.

Thank you to everyone who has listened, written to me, shared a song or simply stayed for another chapter. You are a very large part of why I still love doing this. And please continue listening carefully. At my current writing speed, there is a reasonable chance one of you will eventually end up in a song. And before I disappear back into my little hidden world, thank you so much to everyone at York Calling for inviting me. It has been a genuine pleasure answering these questions and I hope we can do it again one day.

Until then, thank you for reading, thank you for listening… and take good care of yourselves. Until soon.

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