It's a little difficult to properly trace the history of Philidelphia electronic artist Lucy Digi Kitty aka Digikitty, so I'm not really going to try. In part because I'm most excited about their current work, but also because I'm afraid of getting something wrong. As far as I can tell, she's been releasing chirpy variations of digitally enabled fifth-wave emo in the vein of Hey, Ily with a heavy reliance on reverse reverb for about a hear and a half. She's released a ton of music over her short career with the project, a lot of it under the name Beatricks- a name she no longer uses for reasons that will likely always remain a mystery to me. If you are a good internet sleuth, you couldn't probably find out more. I am not, so here the low down as far as I can tell; Lucy has been making a lot of chiptune emo and shoegaze with electronic beats and she used to go by another name. Caught up? Good. Let's talk about Kitty Cola. Released at the end of October 2022, Kitty Cola represents a hard turn into erratic, almost spastic breakcore. Her music still hangs on to many of her 8-bit emo inclinations - confessional lyrics, echoey vocal filters, jangling melodies, and low resolution soundcard effects - but Kitty Cola has evolved drastically beyond the constraints of her former sound, dipping into valleys of hazy, heady techno and darting through collapsing corridors of crumbling feedback while operating under think cross-section canopies of brutalist synth arches. Some parts sound like a Game Gear committing suicide by bludgening itself with it own internal speaker, other times its spirit appears to be attempting to communicate with you through a cracked and neglected Tamagotchi, while other parts could only be explained by the demonic possession of a patchwork drummachine resulting from spell instructions in a Tumblr post being skimmed and improperly executed. Turely, some of these tracks sound like they've been ripped straight out of hell, exemplified by the vicious melodies and charred and extra crispy guitars of the Sega soundclash "Marciline the Drum and Bass Queen." The transformation of Digikitty's sound is not restricted to a hand full of tracks on Kitty Cola either. It's a total aesthetic turnover. "im a bit of a crybaby" back paddles like it was swimming in an ice bath of ethereal goth textures, "If it Bleeds Then it Dies" is like if My Bloody Valentine had written the title screen music for a mass-market Dreamcast game about urban delinquency akin to Jet Set Radio, and "Cigarette Butts in Old Coffee" is a laudable slow-shuffling weeper that attempts to revive SoundCloud era hip-hop by resorecting all of that moments most degected habits and inward looking proclivities. Kitty Cola is like if Lucy boiled down all of her previous work in vat of cherry coke and used the resulting syrupy lacquer to paint a custom retro racing arcade cabinet stuffed with dynamite and then list the fuse. Its fast. Its dangerous. Its verging on the absurd. But most of all, its outrageously fun. I don't know where this project is headed, but I'm stoked to find out!
