Cakes Da Killa Teams Up With DJ Miss Parker on NEW BITCH: Bringing Vocals Back to the Dance Floor

A voice memo sent back from a Berlin tour stop filled out an entire EP in two weeks. That's how NEW BITCH, the collaboration between Cakes Da Killa and DJ Miss Parker, began — not with a planning meeting, but with Miss Parker chatting about the beats she'd been making with her friend Byrell The Great at Nowadays, then going home and cranking out five or six demos over the next two months before sending an email to Cakes, who was in Berlin at the time.

"This bitch makes beats?" Cakes Da Killa recalled thinking in an interview with The FADER. He said he was crashing at a producer friend's place at the time — the first track he thought was "kind of cute," the second he thought was "solid," and his friend even walked out of the room to ask what he was listening to. He recorded all eight beats. "It was really that simple," he said. Miss Parker, for her part, said she was "completely floored" — within two weeks, she had nearly a full project back.

The two have known each other for years and were casual acquaintances in New York's nightlife scene, but had never actually worked together. Miss Parker recalled meeting Cakes at a show the first time she came to New York — though he had no memory of it at all. That detail became a running joke in the interview, and hints at how NEW BITCH feels less like a planned project and more like two people finally clicking after years of near-misses.

The EP's title track "NEW BITCH" rides an acid-tinged, driving beat with the lyric "feel like a new bitch with a new vibration," while "LETHAL" lets Cakes' crisp enunciation float over a wall of eerie, cinematic synths.

Miss Parker on the relationship between producing and DJing: "Learn how to mix, please"

As one of the key figures in Brooklyn's dance music revival scene, Miss Parker describes her DJ approach as carrying a "punk spirit," chasing emotional highs that actually move people — a mindset that extends into her production process too. She notes that many producers used to be DJs first, splicing together different records to build new tracks. "Producing and DJing are both about tension, instinct, and taking risks," she said.

Both artists call out a specific phenomenon: dance tracks with vocals are often labeled "distracting" and pushed out of contemporary DJ sets. Cakes Da Killa isn't having it: "Vocals disappearing from dance music is because these DJs don't know how to mix a record with vocals in it — that's the real reason, nothing else." He argues that stacking a whole night of drone music on top of itself is "kind of culty, honestly" — a line that had both of them cracking up.

Miss Parker adds that she always weaves plenty of vocal tracks into her sets. "Not everybody can stomach that drone-y stuff," she said — vocals, in her view, are how you build a narrative in a set and give listeners something to connect with emotionally. She traces this back to the lineage of queer nightlife history: the "bitch tracks" style pioneered by Kevin Aviance and Sweet Pussy Pauline grew out of ballroom culture. "Most people wouldn't even dare make music like Kevin Aviance did — his vocal style, his attitude, his enunciation, it's raw and fierce." She points to "Cunty (The Feeling)" as an example: "Drop that at literally any party and the whole room goes off."

Cakes Da Killa brings it back to a deeper issue of erasure in dance music history: "Taking vocals out of dance spaces is absolutely erasing dance music's history. We have Martha Wash's voice — we have all these powerful Black women and queer artists who created this stuff. They shouldn't be cut out of the conversation." Miss Parker closes the interview with a blunt call to action: "DJs, learn how to mix, learn phrasing, please."

The NEW BITCH EP features eight tracks produced by DJ Miss Parker, with vocals throughout by Cakes Da Killa.