Kaycie Satterfield

Kaycie Satterfield makes gritty dream pop from her northeast Los Angeles apartment.

While that might call to mind rough-and-ready lo-fi gems, Satterfield instead captures a production style as lush and intimate as her inner world. Resistant to genre constraints, within Satterfield’s music synthy 90’s-tinged pop may be curtailed by post-punk inspired guitar melodies or fuzzed out slowcore ballads set to trip hop beats.

Satterfield leans into the endless, prickly change inherent in life. So when the sought-after touring guitarist broke her wrist in 2020 and was entirely unable to play her instrument for months, she had no choice but to embrace change. “Guitar is my main source of continuity and income,” she says. “So I had to learn how to think outside of my current conventions and to work with limitations.” First, she needed to figure out how to write and play with one hand tied behind her back. But a breakup and four subsequent cross-country moves meant she'd have to make peace with far more drastic change. Rather than be stuck in dated patterns and stories, Satterfield was newly determined to tell her story her own way. She did what any rational person would do and took the endless time and collective uncertainty of that year to learn the basics of synthesis and music production.

The resulting album, 2024’s Rosie is a glistening slice which bolsters Satterfield’s songwriting with a new perspective and rich, synth-driven production. Since its release, Rosie has accumulated hundreds of thousands of streams, as well as extensive college radio play, features on BIRP.fm’s playlist, slots on David Dean Burkhart’s playlist, and multiple opening slots.

Ever since she got her first acoustic guitar, inspired by seeing Sheryl Crow on TV, Satterfield has used music to simultaneously understand herself and connect with others. Growing up in Texas, she often felt like a misfit socially and ideologically. Satterfield demonstrates the power of new perspectives, both in her process and in the compositions’ empathic catharsis.

Her new music explores the way that joy and rage live in our bodies in the current sociopolitical climate.