Slayyyter Comes Full Circle Five Years After Debut Mixtape

Her breakout project dripped with Y2K references, from celebrity obsession to trashy centerfolds, and featured Slayyyter with black hair streaks and a tramp stamp lying half-naked inside a neon pink tanning bed. The sound of Slayyyter was extremely online, at the time grouped with the hyperpop scene, and featured influence from key collaborator Ayesha Erotica. Songs like “Alone” or “Candy” were studied and referential, bringing early 2000s Britney Spears gloss onto SoundCloud and fan forums.

This week, Slayyyter celebrates the anniversary of her debut show and self-titled mixtape, both of which launched half a decade of making music. She returned to Elsewhere Thursday night for a surprise show, including all the deep cuts superfans have come to love. “BFF” rattles speakers the same way it did on day one, and “Daddy AF” still manages to destroy Slayyyter’s blowout while driving the crowd into total chaos. She also sang her new single, “No Comma,” out today, which saw her growling into the mic and screaming “Kill that motherfucker!” as her dress quite literally fell apart from the excitement.

Despite the night being filled with nostalgia, it’s clear that Slayyyter is hungrier than ever. After her pop-up London show and prior to New York, we caught up with the artist to reflect on the “lasting power” of Slayyyter, below.

I love being connected by way of a publicist.

[Laughs] Yeah, I love this for us. It's very official, the most official.

Are you in New York already?

I am, I got here last night.

How was London?

It was fun. A really quick trip, but it was a good time.

I saw everyone was freaking out about you performing your “Gimme More” remix.

Yeah, I don't understand. People really love ones that I’m like, Eh [Laughs].

Maybe it's because there's a mystique around the fact that it was never officially released.

Yeah, true. That was my TikTok moment, I guess.

I feel like when fans see that somebody they love also acknowledges anything they thought was their secret, it's always exciting.

Oh, that's very true. I never thought of it that way.

I wanted to do this interview because the mixtape anniversary is such a special moment for you, but PAPER has also been there on the ground from the beginning. So I've known you, before we were friends in real life, in a weird internet way, and have all the different perspectives of your career since then.

All my mental breakdowns [Laughs].

[Laughs] Let's start by talking about where you were when you were making this early music. You were working at, I think, a tanning salon in St. Louis, Missouri?

Hair salon. I wish it was a tanning salon, that would have been really cunt and full-circle.

Oh, true. And what were you doing at the hair salon?

I was the receptionist. They didn't even let me touch the hair, I was just answering the phone. I was a waitress and I quit my waitressing job, and this woman who's been doing my hair since I was in middle school was like, “Wait, we need a new receptionist.” It was very much one of those things where I dropped out of college and didn't have much direction, so I started working that job.

In the meantime, I would make music out of my closet. I was living with my mom. There were always those conversations where she's like, “What are you going to do? You can't just work at the hair salon forever, you've got to figure some things out. You need to go to community college.” And I was very delusional, like, “I'm making music with these producers online. It's gonna work, it's gonna be fine.” I’d split my time between my job and doing that.

I was still working that job, making a lot of the music, making a lot of these singles. I would be at work fucking off on my phone, and then I would see that like, PAPER Magazine would put me on a best song roundup of the week and it would be like, “BFF,” my first song. I was like, “Oh shit.” Like, SoundCloud plays would keep going up and I could feel that something was starting to happen.

When you say you were making music in your closet, were you cold reaching out to these producers online and introducing yourself?

Basically, I would go on Twitter, like I DM’d Ayesha [Erotica] that way. I linked up with her through Twitter DMs and also I linked up with Robokid that way. I would just DM and be like, “Hey, I'm a singer. If you have any beats, I would love to try some stuff,” and I would record my vocals and send it back-and-forth through the internet. I did not know what I was doing. I kind of knew how to engineer myself, but that was where that ended. It was enough to get songs together and send them to a producer.

That’s kind of crazy. Did you have examples of work where they were like, “We want to send our beats to this girl”?

No, I was literally an internet girl. I posted pictures of my boobs and I had Y2K style and I would post webcam photos. I think having a cool look, people were like, “Oh, we’ll see. It could be terrible, but it could be fine.” I wasn't the best singer at the time, anyway. I was alright, but it was enough to where we’d make one song and it would turn out cool. And then everyone would be like, “Let's make more. Obviously, you're not just randomly trying to do this.”

Knowing you now, it's funny, because you are very pop music obsessed, and smart with your understanding of the industry and navigating trends. When everything started taking off, did you have the foresight of, I'm going to become a big pop star that tours the world as Slayyyter?

I just wanted to get out of that situation. My delusion was not so delusional to where I was like, “I'm gonna be playing stadiums next week.” I just wanted this to blow up, I wanted to be at a point where I could quit that job and have music be my main job. That was always the goal. Obviously, every artist is lying if they say that they don't want things to be as big as possible. Everybody wants to be successful, everybody wants to have success in their life. To me, success was having music be my main source of income and not having to do anything on the side. My main gig.

I was making so much music. I was releasing a song a week and every single one would be like, more articles, more fans online, more people tweeting about it, making memes out of it. People being like, “Who’s this Slayyyter girl?” I was getting my first haters.It all happened so fast. I think back to that time and I just remember sitting at my desk at my job in my ugly Zara work outfit answering the phone. Everything just started to change.

One of the exciting things was this anonymity, like, Who even is Slayyyter? You weren't really showing anything about yourself in a visual way. Even when PAPER ran our first interview with you, I remember you sent in edited Photo Booth photos. People didn’t know what you looked like. Was that a conscious decision as part of the artist project? Or were you easing into the comfort of being more public facing?

It wasn't a decision, I just didn't really have the tools. Obviously, there are artists who do it on no budget, who do photoshoots all the time with videos. I just didn't have that at my disposal in St. Louis. Maybe if I lived in a different city I would have had more, but the Photo Booth was what I could get my hands on for visuals. I think it worked out because the mystery of it all really intrigued people, like you said. People didn't have videos of me talking. This was pre-TikTok, so I was kind of like this weird slutty Facetuned cyborg girl. People didn't know if I was real, people thought the whole thing was doctored Photoshop. They didn't know if I was even a girl, they were really confused. I think all that made it feel cooler. Things are more exciting to discover when there's a question mark over it.

I don't think that could be replicated now, because we’re in an era of extreme content overload and of knowing everything about everyone online. Like you said, TikTok didn’t exist, and now there's really no mystery. It feels like the timing of everything coming out five years ago made it more successful. Do you agree?

Absolutely. When young artists ask me for advice, my best advice is always, “Don't give so much away.” It doesn't excite me to come across an artist and have them be like, “Do you like Sabrina Carpenter? Well, you're gonna love my song.” It's such an unsexy way to discover music. TikTok is a really great tool, because anyone has a chance to blow up and go viral, but it’s removed some of the mystique of new artists and having the work speak for itself, rather than trying to explain what the song's about. It's always a snippet and the lyrics are on the screen. That is a very weird pet peeve of mine. I feel like it should just be a visual. Let me figure out what you’re saying.

At the time when I was releasing music, it was just about the pictures and the mood and the vibe and world building this Y2K, slutty Maxim girl Playboy Bunny vibe without needing all that. I think it's hard to replicate any trajectory, no two trajectories are the same. I wish that artists now who’re just getting started would have a little more mystery to it, just because I don't want to be told what I'm listening to and why I should be listening to it.

It’s true, your songs became big on their own and then people got to know you afterwards. “BFF,” for me, was really your first breakthrough moment. Do you consider that song to be the first that took off?

Yeah, that was the first one that people really grabbed onto.

It’s a really cool song, kind of sexy and scary in a way. Then I think about “Mine,” which was the really big one, right? Still to this day, that's one of the songs people freak out over the most when you perform it live. Talk me through the process of actually making that song and why you think it landed back then.

It was the same thing, where I was recording music in my closet. I remember I started going to LA a little bit here and there for writing trips, and on one of my writing trips I was in a session with Robokid, who played this demo he made with someone else. It already had the hook — I'll be very transparent that I did not write the, “Oh me, oh my.” There were some words written on it, but I made a second verse, I made a bridge, and I went home and recorded all the vocals. I think I sent them to Ayesha to mix a little bit because she was doing some of my vocal engineering.

That one came out during a time on Twitter — I don't know if you remember those really hectic fan edits, where it would be really quick, really chaotic videos of, like, a trash can flying down the street. Everyone started to put the [“Mine”] hook to that and it started making the rounds on Twitter. Everyone was like, “Where's the song? Where's the song?” And I rushed to put it out. That became bigger than “BFF” and bigger than things I had released before, which was really lucky because sometimes you only get one song. That and “Daddy AF” both hit in a way that kept the momentum going.

I was never making these marketing decisions, I was just going with the flow and figuring things out as I went. But super crazy, I was still living in Missouri at that time, so I was getting these celebrity co-signs, but I would be drunk at the bar with my skater friends and I’d be like, “Look bro, Grimes tweeted me!” [Laughs] I just remember feeling really weird. Like, who would have thought this would happen? I always wanted this to happen and it's happening, this is so weird.

In some ways, I feel like nothing has changed. We’ll still be in a bar, drunk and talking shit.

I'm still a tweaker at heart, always. That’s for damn sure. Once you get thrown into this machine or whatever, I feel like during COVID there were some moments with Troubled Paradise, for example, where you sign with a label and everyone's like, “We've got to make this big.” And that was never really what I was trying to do in the first place. My eyes started to get a little hungrier and I needed to make things work, and sometimes the instinct that I had that would make good decisions kind of fell to the wayside. Because I was like, “I want this to be successful, I want to be a big pop star.” It's no longer about that, and I feel like I've had a full-circle moment where I'm back to where I mentally was when I first started. I'm just like, “Fuck all this, this is for fun. This is not meant to be taken so seriously.” I don't need to be breaking my back over trying to get a hit song. That's not what my M.O. is.

I'm still pretty disillusioned by the celebrity of it all and the chart success. I always see kids on Twitter that are like, “She can't even maintain a million monthly listeners,” and it's like, I could give a fuck about that. Like, that is so not why I make music or what I set out to do. I would rather do something for the culture that is cool to people, that has influence on the way people dress, or a certain subculture or aesthetic that people get really into. That's more what I'm about. I'm not really looking for commercial success, but I was certainly drinking the Kool-Aid for a little bit there.

You have the foundation of cultural credibility in a major way from this mixtape, and so there were inevitably people who’d come running and try to figure out how to make everything even bigger. But what makes for a lasting artist? Is it maintaining a million listeners on Spotify, or is it being able to pop up in the way that you just did and surprise announce a London show days before?

I feel like that's so true. There's no right or wrong answers with building up an artist or a career. But I think a lot of times the industry of it all will ruin things. I see a lot of artists that are really cool, and then they announce that they're signed and you never really hear from them again. It's a difficult thing, because it can either benefit you a lot or it can cap your momentum or make you operate in a way that you weren't operating before. I was just doing stuff that I wanted to do, putting songs out really fast. As soon as you get thrown into it all, it's like, “You made this song, we can put it out in two months, we need all this lead time.” And it kind of takes the steam out of everything.

I think “No Comma” is a good example. I tweeted the teaser, I was like, “Fuck it, I want to put this out next week,” and that’s just not the way things work. So the song has been teased for the whole year, so people know what’s coming. I think operating in that way with surprise releases and doing things really fast always reward artists more in the long run than these really thought out, planned-out rollout scenarios.

There's something to be said about operating creatively off innocence and instincts. It's almost like, the more you know the more it clouds the thinking that initially made you successful. For a lot of people, it's hard to get back to that, but it seems like you are, which I love.

I still feel like I'm trying to get back into that headspace I've had as I've gotten older. I've had a mental Renaissance on everything I thought about music or thought that I wanted, and I feel like I don't want the same things I wanted even two years ago. I want the same things I wanted when I was a hair salon receptionist. I just want to make cool music and cool visuals. I'm not really looking for chart success or a crazy viral moment. If I'm happy with my output at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

But it is hard to get back to it once you start learning about, like, playlist pitching and all this stuff. I think with my last one, I was like, “Oh, I need some clean songs, like a radio song.” Little by little, things creep in where maybe you wouldn't have made that choice in a different setting. But I think I'm back to just being like, “Fuck it.”

[Laughs] Back to “Daddy AF” vibes.

Yes, absolutely.

I want to talk about your first concert ever, which was in 2019 at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. I was there and remember it being really wild to finally see you in the flesh after all the mystery online. Did you fly into New York from Missouri?

Either from Missouri or from a writing trip in LA. Everything happened so fast, I don't even think my mixtape was out. I had never done a show as Slayyyter, I had never done anything. My manager was like, “We should test the waters and see what goes down.” We put up night one and I think it sold out in like 15 minutes, and then we put up night two and that sold out again in like 15 minutes. It was insanity and I was like, “Oh my god, I've never performed before. What is gonna happen?” Rehearsal for this show was the first time my manager even heard me sing, like, “She could be really terrible.”

So I wiggled my ass into that little Tanya Hardy bodysuit and went for it. It was kind of like being thrown into the deep end, and it's funny because the whole show was recorded and it’s on YouTube, which is insane. It's almost like watching sports highlights. I like to go back and be like, “Whoa, I was barely moving.” It was really wacky to go from being a hair salon receptionist to there being a line out the door of people who just wanted to meet me. I was like, “This is so weird. I think I'm a little over my head with this, but I’m also loving every minute of it.”

Artists today would love to have two sold out nights, back-to-back, in Elsewhere’s main room. Did you really understand and process the significance of that?

Honestly, not until a little bit later. I thought that maybe that's just how it goes, like it's my first show. I didn't know if that was a big venue to sell out. I had no gauge of anything and never opened for anyone before. I hate to say this, but I feel like I skipped a couple steps because there were no tiny, tiny clubs. Some people will play to, like, 100 people as their first show on a tiny stage and that's how they build their way up. But I just got thrown in and I didn't have anything to compare it to. I wasn't sure if that was normal or not.

I also think it was such a specific time of internet hype, pre-COVID. I don’t know if shows sell out that fast now unless you’re a super big artist. If you were to fast forward what was happening to me and put it in this current timeline, I don't think it would have been the big, crazy blowout that it was. It was just a very specific time of culture and the internet where people wanted to show up and they wanted to say that they saw me first.

It was also a very specific time with the type of music being made that many people slotted you in with. There was a lot of excitement around that specific pop sound.

It felt like such an internet niche. I remember during that time I was like, “Maybe my career is going to have a really hefty expiration date on it, because this is so internet and of its time now.” But I've always shape-shifted, like I was a Tumblr girl and then I got really into Twitter. No matter what, I always kind of know what's going on with the internet. Everyone was playing my songs in the clubs in New York during that time too, so I feel like there was this unspoken, “Let's go see that girl. They play that ‘Candy’ song at the club, let's go see her.” I was getting tagged in all these videos of people playing my music in clubs and I was like, “Oh, people are listening.”

When you listen to the mixtape now, how do you feel? I know you are very critical of music. Are you still proud of the work and are there certain songs that you think hold up to this day?

Honestly, I feel so proud of it. It's funny, I feel like “Daddy AF,” that's a song I was really ashamed of. I remember when it came out, that was my first taste of getting hated on by the internet. I did a licensing deal with Atlantic, so they ran a bunch of ads on it, and all these people that didn't normally follow me were finding it and they were like, “She's ugly. We hate her. This is dog shit. We hate this song.” And to this day, it's my favorite song to perform live. It feels punk when I perform that song. That song has stood the test of time. I still listen to it now and I'm like, “I love this.” Or “Mine” and “BFF” are still so great to me.

When I put this out, Y2K was not the big internet subculture that it is now. I remember putting my moodboard together for my mixtape, and it was all old pictures of Playboy editorials from 2006 and Maxim and pictures from girls’ Myspaces of them in a tanning bed. Since then, I’ve seen so much tanning bed imagery. I see black streaks and tramp stamps. It's made me feel really proud, not bitter, like I don't need the credit for it, but I'm just like, “You know what? People can say what they want, but I was early on this wave of something. Any time I want to doubt myself as an artist, I'm like, “At least I did that and I think it resonated with people.”

So I’m really proud of all of it, not just the music, but the visuals, too, and my shitty webcam photos. I feel like people with a budget are moving into a space of trying to do shitty camcorder, webcam visuals, and that feels like the coolest thing in the world. There's lasting power there with something that I did just out of necessity.

Photos courtesy of Slayyyter/Monika Oliver