Ally Nicholas released “Bullets” on October 5, 2021, on her own, right after leaving a previous manager, and by her own account she put it out precisely because she was too depressed to care about the rollout. “I was so depressed and I didn't give a shit about anything so I was like yeah I don't care, just drop that song,” she told Sounds of Saving. The single she almost shrugged into the world turned out to be the pivot of her whole catalog: the track she now calls the “bridge between some of the more pop stuff and the rock-leaning stuff” she does today.
What was happening around the release?
By late 2021, Nicholas had a promising but conventional start behind her. Her debut “Feels Like Dying” (October 2020) had passed 100,000 Spotify streams and drawn praise from Ones to Watch as “a hauntingly beautiful ode to heartbreak”; “Warning Signs” (February 2021) had earned Billie Eilish comparisons from EUPHORIA Magazine. The machinery of a standard alt-pop come-up was assembling around her, including management.
Then the management relationship ended, and “Bullets” came out into the vacuum. No campaign, no strategy meeting, no rollout calendar. Just an artist at a low point deciding the song should exist anyway. It is the least glamorous origin story in her discography, and the most instructive one.
Why call it a depression release?
Because Nicholas does, in effect. She has been candid that depression has been part of her life since age 14, intensifying around 16 and 17, a period she later wrote about directly in her 2023 single “Seventeen.” “That song is about, obviously, my crippling depression and how I've been struggling with it since I was 14,” she told Sounds of Saving of that later track. Songwriting itself began as her coping mechanism: “I definitely have trouble expressing my emotions and processing them and so the reason I started [writing] in the first place was for that.”
The apathy stripped away every reason to wait. What was left was the song.
“Bullets” is the moment that coping mechanism collided with the business. The conventional industry advice in that situation, between managers, between eras, mid-crisis, is to hold the record and wait for infrastructure. The depression made the calculation irrelevant: the apathy stripped away every reason to wait, and what was left was the song. There is a strange purity in that. Not a recommended release strategy, but an honest one.
What did the bridge lead to?
Everything that now defines her. Nicholas frames “Bullets” as the connective track between her early alt-pop material and the rock lane she lives in now: the grunge-gaze sound she built in Los Angeles with producer Diego Ferrera, the collaborator she credits with helping her “figure out my sound as an artist.” The 2023-24 singles run that followed, “I Know You Too Well,” “Seventeen,” “Fall Into,” “All Summer Long,” “Bored,” walked across that bridge one release at a time.
The self-released era ended on its own terms. In November 2025, Position Music signed her to a global deal, with Nicholas explaining her patience in language that traces straight back to the “Bullets” period: “As an artist you hear a lot of cautionary tales about signing to a label, so I was in no rush.” An artist who had already released her way through the worst of it had nothing to prove to a label, which is exactly the leverage that made the eventual deal worth signing.
The candor became the catalog
What makes “Bullets” more than a footnote is that the honesty around it never got retired. Nicholas gave the full account to Sounds of Saving, an organization focused on music and mental health, in a 2024 interview that also covered her ten-minute writing sessions and her refusal to perform for approval: “I'll never do anything on stage for claps.” The willingness to document the low points is now part of the artist, the same way it is for scene neighbors like Nessa Barrett, whose mental-health candor anchors her catalog, or Julia Alexa, whose whole lane is built on it.
Five years on, the song's real legacy is a proof: the work can survive the worst stretches of the person making it, and sometimes the release you barely cared about becomes the one the whole catalog turns on. “Just drop that song” was never a strategy. It was a symptom that accidentally became a philosophy, and the philosophy built a career.