Kitty Hall Samples Kelis on Brooding Acid-House Cut 'Witty'

A Manchester Producer's Acid-House Take on a 2003 Classic

A 20-year-old Manchester producer samples Kelis and André 3000, gets the clearance, drops a brooding acid-house cut, and lands it in the top 40 of Beatport's tech house chart. That's the story of "Witty," and it lands harder than it sounds on paper because Kitty Hall is clearly not making music to game a genre tag — she's building on influences that run from Tricky to Underworld to Faithless, and the house she makes has that foundation under it.

"Witty" samples the vocal from Kelis and André 3000's 2003 collaboration "Millionaire." That track was always an outlier — a hip-hop feature with a pop hook that carried more emotional weight than its production suggested. Hall's version strips back the sentiment and puts the vocal into a very different mechanical context: fast percussion, a heavy groove, flashes of acid texture, all of it aimed squarely at late-night rooms. The result is a track that earns its Beatport placement without feeling like it was built to get there.

Who Is Kitty Hall?

Hall left her criminology, law, and psychology studies to pursue club culture seriously — a CV that wouldn't feel out of place for a UK producer of an earlier generation, but feels more deliberate now that the institutional path is harder to abandon. Based in Manchester, she has played XOYO and Hï Ibiza, with sets in Miami mixed in alongside the domestic circuit. Josh Baker, Skream, and Omar+ have backed her work, which is useful context: these aren't names that throw support around casually.

Her cited influences — Tricky, Underworld, Massive Attack, Faithless — tell you something about how she hears house music. These are artists who treated the dancefloor as a serious space for texture and atmosphere, not just tempo and repetition. That sensibility shows up in "Witty." It's not a track that explains itself through energy alone. The brooding quality of the production has a character that sits outside the purely functional approach that dominates a lot of what charts in the genre right now.

The Sample Clearance as a Scene Moment

Hall has said publicly that she's "always loved André 3000 and Kelis," and she thanked them for allowing the track to be released. Sample clearance stories in house music are usually cautionary tales — the label that didn't clear it, the record that got pulled, the producer left exposed. This one runs the other way. The original artists approved it, and that fact arguably says something about the quality of what Hall did with it: a sample handled with enough craft and respect to earn sign-off from the people who originally recorded the vocal.

House music has always operated partly as a kind of institutional memory for pop and soul and R&B. The tracks that get sampled most often are the ones that had something in them that regular radio couldn't fully exhaust. Kelis had vocal charisma that didn't need its original context to carry weight. Hall found another home for it, one that lets the vocal work differently — something between a reminder and a reinterpretation.

Where 'Witty' Sits on the Beatport Chart

The track has settled into the tech house top 40, sharing real estate with records from Cloonee, Prospa, Mau P, and Dom Dolla — names running at the genre's peak right now. For a 20-year-old producer on her fourth single, that chart placement is not a trivial thing. It's also on the main Beatport tech house chart, not a deep house or minimal subcategory — the most contested and visible corner of the platform for underground house music in 2026.

Her earlier singles — "Techno Was an Art," "Puff Puff Pass," and "I Luv It" — established a pattern of short, dense club tools that know exactly what they're for. "Witty" follows that pattern and adds a recognisable vocal anchor. It's the kind of move that widens a producer's reach without compromising what they're doing on the dancefloor side. Her collage artwork — made from her own doodles of anatomical figures, dinosaurs, train tickets, and graffiti — underscores the self-contained visual sensibility she's clearly building alongside the music.

What This Track Signals for the Genre

Tech house has a complicated relationship with pop culture. At its worst, it's a genre that cannibalises chart moments for algorithmic playtime with no craft behind the conversion. "Witty" sits at the other end of that spectrum. The sample is the starting point, not the product. Hall has made something with texture and mood that earns its own identity while carrying the weight of the original reference.

The acid house undercurrent is worth flagging separately. Acid has had a persistent, quiet revival running through UK club music for a few years now, with producers treating the 303 not as a novelty but as a genuine tonal tool. Hall's use of acid texture in "Witty" isn't decorative — it gives the track the edge that keeps it from being smooth in the wrong way. A producer who cited Underworld and Massive Attack would know exactly what acid can do to the feel of a groove. Here, it does its job.