Kitty Credit: Sam Ray

In 2012, a teenage Claire’s employee from Daytona Beach, Florida, going by the X-Men-inspired alias Kitty Pryde released “Okay Cupid,” a dreamy and dreary cloud-rap track that quickly went viral. Just months later Kitty (the Pryde was quickly dropped) started collaborating with fellow Internet hip-hop sensation Riff Raff, and by 2013 she was touring with Danny Brown (at the peak of his XXX-era hype) in support of her excellently quirky and catchy D.A.I.S.Y. Rage EP. But 2013 is like a century ago in Internet years—how does a bedroom rap star stay relevant over that length of time? The answer is revolution and reinvention. By 2015, Kitty had completely stepped away from the vapory cloud-rap genre she helped establish and begun putting out spacey electro-pop tracks through her Bandcamp page. That summer, she took to Kickstarter to fund her first proper full-length. While the campaign was a wild success, the following years were anything but. Album production was stalled due to the breakdown of a relationship with one of Kitty’s producers and the theft of a hard drive containing the bulk of its finished product. But last August, almost two years to the day of Kitty’s initial Kickstarter post, Miami Garden Club saw the light of day. The album is full of spacey, psychedelic, and experimental pop perfection, with a mix of certified bangers and introspective slow jams.   v