Joely Ketterer – Attraction to Great Damage
Why does what harms us often exert a greater pull than what strengthens us?
Berlin-based singer-songwriter Joely Ketterer explores this question on her debut album Attraction to Great Damage. Across 16 English-language songs, she distills experience into poetic imagery — precisely observed, with no claim to offering answers.
Joely writes about closeness — sometimes exploited, sometimes endured, sometimes fended off with tremendous effort. About grief that lingers. About deception, self-loss, and shadows she struggles to escape. About the fight for independence. Her songs give voice to what often goes unspoken.
Musically, Attraction to Great Damage moves between extremes: stripped-back and intimate one moment, cinematically opulent or driven by propulsive rhythms the next — with a distinctive way Joely uses her voice even within the choruses. The album unfolds its full effect above all through close, focused listening.
Unguarded lyrics, female perspectives, and a literary imagery define the album. In this, Joely embodies the “Weird Girl Fiction” hinted at above — already established in literature, here translated into music for the first time, and anything but fiction: idiosyncratic female characters, free of any obligation to please. They are contradictory, unsettling, at times brutal. In literature, parallels can be drawn to Ottessa Moshfegh; musically, to Fiona Apple, girl in red, or boygenius — artists who treat vulnerability not as a pose but as an expression of complexity. The result offers not comfort, but recognition: the feeling of not being alone with despair and deep pain.
The fact that this album is being released now is not a fresh start. It is the logical continuation of an extraordinary musical journey.
For 25 years, Joely’s voice was part of a singular story. Together with her father Oliver, she released seven albums, performed at venues including the Rheingau Musik Festival, and became known to a wide audience through animated films set to her songs on the German children’s program “Sendung mit der Maus.” Her collaboration with her father continues to this day: Attraction to Great Damage was also composed and produced by Oliver Ketterer.
The crucial difference lies elsewhere. For the first time, Joely has written all the lyrics herself. After years as part of this musical duo, she now articulates her own artistic perspective. Her training at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) in London gave her the technical foundation for this step.
With Attraction to Great Damage, Joely is not simply releasing her first solo album. For the first time, she steps forward as the full author of her own story.
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