Cakes Da Killa and DJ Miss Parker share vocal club EP New Bitch

Cakes Da Killa and DJ Miss Parker have released New Bitch, an eight-track EP built from a fast-moving, largely long-distance collaboration between the queer rapper and the Brooklyn DJ and producer, who is a central figure in the city's ongoing dance music revival.

Despite years of crossing paths in New York's nightlife scene, the two had never worked closely together until a conversation at the Brooklyn club Nowadays pushed Miss Parker to send Cakes a batch of beat ideas while he was on tour in Berlin. Cakes recorded vocals over all eight of the tracks she sent, finishing the EP in a whirlwind two weeks.

The result is a high-octane record, with Cakes delivering pointed, fast-moving bars over beats built for the peak of a DJ set. On the title track, "New Bitch," he leans into a mood of reinvention over acid-soaked production, while "Lethal" pairs his crisp diction with a colder, synth-haunted, cinematic beat.

For both artists, putting vocals front and center in club music carries weight beyond craft. Cakes pushed back on the idea, common among some dance music purists, that vocal tracks are simply "distracting." "A lack of vocals in the dance space definitely erases the history of dance music," he said, pointing to singers like Martha Wash as artists whose voices shaped the genre and shouldn't be written out of it.

DJ Miss Parker traces that same lineage further back, to the ballroom-born "bitch tracks" style associated with artists like Kevin Aviance and Sweet Pussy Pauline, and argues that DJs who avoid vocal tracks are often just unpracticed at mixing them well. Both artists frame New Bitch as a way of keeping that tradition of campy, vocal-forward queer dance music alive in clubs today.

New Bitch adds to a run of vocal-forward dance and electronic records crossing over with hip-hop this year, tracked alongside other new releases on the release calendar.