Whatever Happened to Kitty?
Kitty Ray, formerly Pryde, on growing up, Tumblr fame, and independence
Written by Jordan Michelman| Photographed by Sam Ray | As appeared in Yes Plz Weekly Issue 029, June 10, 2019
At age 18 in 2012, the Florida-born artist — then known as Kitty Pryde — scored an unlikely viral hit single with the song “Okay Cupid,” a (literally) teenage bedroom rap over gauze linen Soundcloud beats, with lyrics like “It’s my party, couldn’t cry if I wanted to / and the more you taunt me, the more I think I’m wanting you.”
The song is an exercise in juxtaposition — a baby-faced red-haired American teenager rapping cooly about her preferences for “cigarette breath” and late-night drunk dials. “Okay Cupid” has been played nearly two million times on YouTube, and earned Kitty a spot on Rolling Stone’s “Top 50 Songs of 2012” (all the way up to #17).
And then, like so many before her, the artist pursued a range of opportunities afforded by her big break. She moved to New York, then L.A.; she collaborated with a coterie of producers and rappers, and became a kind of cypher for a particularly dark and shitty era of the American recording industry. Years passed; Kitty played festivals, dropped EPs and demos, and released songs via the Adult Swim Singles Program, but nothing touched the popular success of “Okay Cupid.”
Then in 2017, after significant delay and disaster — including losing the entire first draft of the album to LAX luggage theft — she released Miami Garden Club, her crowd-funded, production-maligned, critically-slept-on debut full-length. “Nobody talked about it,” Kitty tells me by telephone from Baltimore, where she now lives. “It didn’t get press, which was so hard for me, because all my stuff before that had been noticed, and in a way I became addicted to the press. When [Miami Garden Club] failed I said ‘Fuck this, maybe I’m bad at it,’ and I sort of gave up.”
For most viral internet wonders the story would end here — fifteen minutes of fame at an early age, followed by misfires and an ignominious exit stage right — except the damnedest thing happened next: Kitty kept making music.
For most viral internet wonders the story would end here — fifteen minutes of fame at an early age, followed by misfires and an ignominious exit stage right — except the damnedest thing happened next: Kitty kept making music. Some of that was solo (including an array of remixes and video game scores), but much of it is in collaboration with her husband, Sam Ray, who records solo as Ricky Eat Acid and in live band form as American Pleasure Club (formerly Teen Suicide). Kitty joined American Pleasure Club in 2018 as a vocalist and touring keyboardist, and she and Sam Ray formed The Pom-Poms, who sound like the music which degenerate cheerleaders might listen to at a blacklight bath salts rave (the group’s eponymous EP dropped in late 2018). All the while Kitty was slowly working on a follow-up to Miami Garden Club, developing songs on tour and writing hooks in clubs, staying up to four a.m. recording vocals and occasionally requisitioning a guitar hook or bass riff from her bandmates.
The result is Rose Gold, Kitty’s second full-length record, released independently in the spring of 2019 without label backing, formal promotion, artist representation, or distribution. Kitty has done all interviews and press queries for the record personally (including for this article), advocating for the record with her own voice and agency, and tracking every step along the way online. Despite this lack of label and promotional support — or perhaps because of it — Rose Gold is Kitty’s biggest hit since “Okay Cupid” and her best performing album to date, charting at #9 in the Billboard Electronic charts and doing around 400,000 estimated total streams in its first month. “This time around I refused to set unrealistic expectations for myself,” she says, “but the response has ended up being way better than what I hoped for. It’s been very helpful for my soul, honestly.”
I think there’s two big reasons for the record’s success — really more like two factor modifiers, multiplying upon each other with centrifugal force. The first is the curious and growing domain of Kittystandom. For a complex and amorphously personal set of reasons, many fans of Kitty’s early work as a rapper have stayed hooked on her output over the last decade, growing up alongside the artist and communicating with her directly via the internet. (Kitty has around 35k Twitter followers; this number includes innumerable #StanKitty and #StreamRoseGold accounts operated by fans around the world.) This results in an especially intimate and direct relationship with her listener base, the product of a life lived in digital public from a very young age. “I was just some random kid,” she tells me.
“My parents didn’t have money and I lived in the middle of nowhere Florida, and I was stupid and I would talk about stupid normal life shit, and I think that connected with a lot of kids who were similar.” Today Kitty’s fans are intensely loyal stans, meme-makers, and binge streamers; people who saw beyond the Tumblr rap novelty of “Okay Cupid” and focused instead on her uncommonly smart lyrics (hinted at even as a gawky teen) and evolving pop songwriting style. “Despite how often I doubt myself, there are still people listening to the things I make, and that is very touching to me. They grew up and didn’t stop paying attention because I never stopped talking to them.”
The second reason for Rose Gold’s success is simpler: this record slaps. The rapping is mostly gone now, and Kitty’s musical identity has reemerged as a kind of electro-pop chanteuse in the vein of early 2000s vocal trance popstar Robyn, or French producer duo Télépopmusik, fusing throbbing, beautifully produced dance music with breathlessly hooky vocal and lyrical world building. Think like Ellie Goulding if she were from Florida…and got high.
Kitty built the record from scratch at home, recording on Ableton software and using a mix of cassette recordings, vintage keyboards, digital drum machines, multi-tracked vocals, and occasional touches of guitar and analog percussion. “It was written as a collection of singles,” she tells me, “and most of the songs were never even meant to be released — they were all just things I made for fun while working on other projects over the past couple of years.” Despite all that, the record hangs together as a cohesive work — big danceable pop-up front (the threepeat sequence of “B.O.M.B.,” “Look Demure,” and “Mami” is especially strong) smoothing out into something approaching chillwave on the b-side (the bossanova keyboard come-down that closes “Sweat,” the panic-attack Enya silken trance of “Medicine,” the mantra-like keyboard loop and deep breathing instructions of “Don’t Panic”).
Video game soundtracks — particularly the work of Atlus Co. composer Shoji Meguro — have an outsized influence on the sound of Rose Gold. “Kitty’s Farm” was originally composed as an alternative soundtrack for Stardew Valley; “Strange Magic” is directly inspired by Animal Crossing; “Medicine” evokes 8-bit console and cabinet racing games.
The record has no formal single, but If “B.O.M.B.” were the new Taylor Swift summer hit people would be shouting about it in the streets (naked, at the top of their lungs) declaring it a bold and chance-taking new masterwork fusing pop hooks and wry wit. Atop layered guitar work and lush vocal arrangements, the song’s roaring cassette-built drum beat offers pace and structure for remarkably sophisticated songwriting. Dig that deceptively complex augmented chord at the end of the verse progression, which evokes
If “B.O.M.B.” were the new Taylor Swift summer hit people would be shouting about it in the streets (naked, at the top of their lungs) declaring it a bold and chance-taking new masterwork fusing pop hooks and wry wit
no less hallowed source material than The Beatles’ “In My Life.” Later in the track, the song’s Spector-esque middle 8 (inspired by Kitty’s love for midcentury girl group pop) is especially brilliant lyrically: “You’re a very rich man / and I become a siren / and you need my permission / and I need yellow diamonds.” It’s a meditation on detachment, desire, and sex work — a Brill Building hook shot up with a dose of deadly dry irony, like a day-glo Donald Fagen on molly and ManyVids.
“I feel like the overarching themes of the album are centered around sex work,” Kitty says, and the references aren’t hidden. The video for “Mami” (my pick for the record’s second single) nominates the song as a soundtrack for cam models; the narrator in “Strange Magic” is in a strip club with her phone on airplane mode; the Bandcamp page for Rose Gold declares “this record was written at a strip club.” While Kitty considers herself no hymnist — “I didn’t set out to make [sex work] anthems or pander to anyone” — the record stands as a profound work of agency and respect for the line of work. “The majority of people still refuse to understand that sex work is not some shady last-resort career for desperate women… we sing about loving strippers and put them in music videos, but we still insist that we’d never do that ourselves.”
In this way, Kitty’s incorporation of the theme into Rose Gold connects back to the idea of work songs, one of the earliest forms of music as human expression, and echoes the work of unlikely contemporaries…
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