Kitty Craft Concert Review: A Night of Sweetness

On the evening of Oct. 22, Kitty Craft — the musical alias of Pamela Valfer — began her East Coast tour in the packed Cambridge venue, Sonia. Valfer took the stage with nothing but a small guitar and band members Nils Bryant and Carrie Hansen, layering harmonies and additional guitar strumming beneath her vocals.

The show opened with the up-and-coming musical duo After. Behind singer Justine Dorsey, a fan blew her hair back in rhythmic waves, creating a slow-motion music video effect aided by deep blue lighting and the band’s pulsing, synth-heavy songs. After’s set featured many of their recently released singles including “Ever” and “Deep Diving,” songs which — when paired with Kitty Craft’s similarly immersive, nostalgic sound — produced a cinematic dreamscape for the audience to escape into.

Kitty Craft’s sound is a blend of simple acoustic guitar, expert beat sampling, and ultra-sweet angelic vocals, often layered on top of one another to create twinkling harmonies. Valfer and her band mostly played songs from her late-90s and early 2000s albums — “Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch” and “Catskills” respectively — introducing each song by its title before launching into an explanation of what she had in mind when she wrote and recorded it.

The show felt incredibly intimate, with Valfer speaking to audience members directly from the stage as she tuned her guitar between songs. Kitty Craft transformed the crowded Sonia dance floor from a packed venue into a cozy house show, with Valfer’s sweet, high-pitched vocals and muted acoustic guitar drawing the audience towards the stage as the show progressed.

A whimsically inviting film backdrop accompanied Valfer and her band across songs, alternating between ambient colorful animations, botanical and nature footage, and still collages. The visuals complementing each song evoked a Saturday-morning-cartoon feel: Highlights included low-resolution footage of wildflower fields stitched together with simple, choppy animations of flowers, dancing lines, and a stick figure playing the trumpet to the beat of “When Fortune Smiles.”

Thoughtful details like these —featured in both Kitty Craft’s visuals and music — explained her recent success on social media platforms such as TikTok, where her decades-old albums have gained a dedicated fanbase of young indie music fans and prompted her to release new projects such as 2025’s Volumes I and II of “Bits + Bobs From The Flower Patch.” The crowd at Sonia reflected the age of her fanbase; a sea of X-handed young fans pressed against the stage and meowed between songs.

Ahead of the encore, Kitty Craft played her final song “Alright” as tiny suns filled the screen behind her. There was a surreal, dreamlike quality to the song, enhanced by the visuals. The sense of comfort and joy that Valfer’s music created with her unique pairing of thumping hip-hop samples and simple, repetitive acoustic melodies was particularly striking as a close to the night. The chanting of “It’s alright / It’s alright” felt strangely comforting, as if Valfer were reassuring her fans that all would be well — it would all be alright.

The concert came to a close with Valfer performing a simple acoustic encore song, “I Got Rulez” as an enormous orange tiger lily fanned out on the screen behind her. The song’s gentle sincerity distilled the magical tone that had lingered all evening. The show was simple and powerful in its quiet sweetness, like a hazy dream or a half-remembered movie of some sleepover from your childhood.