Kitty Pryde - Dead Island

Kitty Pryde, AKA 19 year-old Alex Locastro, AKA the first lady of Tumblr pop culture, is a fiercely divisive figure. Her verses are painfully honest insights into Floridian suburbia and have won her collaborations with the likes of Danny Brown and encouraging words from Grimes. After the internet reacted positively and negatively in equal measure to her Okay Cupid video, Kitty has solidified her alt-pop and fluid-flowing sound on this new track from her forthcoming ‘D.A.I.S.Y. Rage’ EP.

Back in October, the Dummy office got all flustered by the work of emerging producer Water. Impossible to pin down, the London artist’s Soundcloud showed some serious promise on his reworks of classic pop anthems. On Dead Island, Kitty has chosen to lay her verse over his (diplo) beat; most notable for its unmistakable Pon de Floor snares. Not that he wanted to be part of the release – Kitty responded to queries below the video with “beat produced by water … who didn’t want to be a part of my tape but i used his song anyway because the damn thing was on soundcloud so whatever stop asking me”.

Dead Island boasts truth-spitting, self-deprecating lyrics like “Wiz is black and yellow and I’m white and f*cking terrible”. Rhyming “otter box” with “otter pops” (giving the explanation that “nothing else rhymes with otter box ok”, there’s a touching honesty to her work. Meanwhile, with direction coming from STEAMCLAM, the video gets up close to a flower-covered Pryde behind sparkly chandeliers, prompting a Tumblr post of “if u guess how many times my boyfriend and his friend disagreed over which chandelier i should stand next to, u win a download code”. Whether or not you “get her”, it’s this kind of wry self-consciousness about what she’s doing that is Kitty’s appeal. And it’s also this that has grabbed the attention of internet users that make up her fan (and hate) base.

‘D.A.I.S.Y. Rage’ is due out sometime this month.