Slayyyter, Pop Provocateur, Shows Off Her Real Self

By Danielle Chelosky


A couple years back, a burgeoning underground pop star worked as a receptionist at a hair salon in St. Louis, Missouri. “I wasn’t the perfect employee,” the 24-year-old Slayyyter, who more formally goes by Catherine Slater, tells MTV over the phone in early April. “My music began to blow up and I was so preoccupied with that. I would just sit at my desk and be on my phone like all day.” She’d read what publications like The Fader or Paper magazine posted about her; she was helping people with their appointments by day and “having this little underground pop thing going on at night.”


That was her last minimum-wage job. It afforded her the ability to purchase beats from producers and visuals from artists while living with her mom and her sister. That was all she required to prepare her chaotic club anthems about sexuality and internet culture that afterward blown up on Soundcloud and Twitter. “Mine” was one of her first hits — a song with a customary structure that necessitates a lot of infectious repetition and memorable lyrics. She gained momentum primarily through Stan Twitter; she knew how to get posters’ attention because she was one. And right now she’s a full-time singer, unveiling her debut album Troubled Paradise on June 11 through the Fader Label.


She also dropped out of college for this. Briefly attending the University of Missouri for each year, Slater studied marketing while attempting to learn about the music industry if she may. She skipped classes to watch Max Martin’s songwriting workshops on YouTube, gradually absorbing how the magic of a successful pop song unfolded into an eas formula. Gradually, she realized that one of the methods to pop stardom was her persona — allowing her physical self to dissolve and materialize into what she describes as a “blonde bimbo Barbie,” something that intrigued people, making them wonder if she was even real. “I got really into Y2K culture,” she says about this character she took on. “[Nostalgic celeb social account] Pop Culture Died in 2009 was a big influence on me — with Lindsay Lohan and all. I wanted to prepare my own identity of being a pop star from that era.”


Those marketing notes came in handy as soon as cultivating a devoted following online. Her fans were suddenly doing all of the work for her, recommending her music to Charli XCX and seeing Charli put one of her songs on a public playlist once Slater had only several singles out. It was clear that she fit in with this current era of pop stars — like the innovative Kim Petras or outlandish Caroline Polachek — especially throughout the experimental era of hyperpop. Her hit “Daddy AF” encapsulates the internet’s obsession with hedonism (“I been fuckin’ models / I been poppin’ bottles all night”) and its necessary for succinct, catchy, memeable mantras: “Daddy as fuck / I feel daddy as fuck” (she says that phrase 42 times in under three minutes).


Making Troubled Paradise was a challenge. Not only due to the pandemic, nevertheless because putting with each other a full, cohesive assortment of songs wasn’t something Slater was used to. Though she already has a self-titled project from 2019, it’s technically imagined a mixtape. “[The music industry] isn’t like it used to be, where people spent years and years crafting these brilliant albums and then they put it out and it’s a smash success,” she says. “You have to be so fast with everything right now because of TikTok trends and just progression in music. It’s been commodified like fast-food consumption in a way.” People appreciate her songs — and any pop or hyperpop songs — because they’re a fast spurt on a playlist, probably best enjoyed at a club or a party. They’re more vibes than they are individual pieces of music.


Yet, this new record forced her to experiment with her process, testing out new methods she’s picked up since her earliest days of making music at night soon after her salon gig. Tracks like the single “Cowboys” or the Gone Girl-esque anthem “Serial Killer” have storylines and arcs. She even let her proper darker feelings spill into some songs, like on “Clouds”: “I wish they knew what goes on in my head / Some days feels like I’d be better off dead.” There’s also the more persona-filled cuts like “Throatzillaaa,” which she points out, laughing, is “literally a disgusting song about sucking dick.” Although she built a career off of using the usual formula she studied to churn out superficial, clubby pop songs, she allowed depth to seep into Troubled Paradise.


And she deserves that ability to let her character go for a song or two. She works hard — so hard that she began developing her next record after finishing this one. Burnout is a familiar sensation for her, and she doesn’t mind. “I feel like in general it keeps me on my toes, keeps me working fast on different things,” she says. The pandemic didn’t impede on the method of actually making Troubled Paradise; a bunch of tracks still needed to be done any time quarantine began, and she was stuck in a studio apartment Airbnb in Glendale, California with time on her hands. Still, she was exceedingly familiar with making music with producers remotely, thanks to her early days on Soundcloud — it seemed like a return to form.


It was inevitable that this record would contain more than Slater’s signature sound. As someone who creates excessively, she never wants to do the same thing over and over. “I certainly had some Avril Lavigne influence,” she says, and points to “Villain,” a synthy sass anthem, which reckons with the way the music industry treats women: “I’m no villain / Although they want me to be one.” She thinks her fans will like her expansion into different genres, which incorporates a lot of fuzzy pop-punk and then some intriguing synthwave, though it’s hard to tell with stans — they’re pretty unpredictable.


“On one hand, I feel like I love [stan culture] so much because I feel like the memes and the jokes are what put my music on the map,” she says. “But there’s also a side where you’re put under certain criticisms and it’s a little bit more ruthless than other fanbases.” She’s attempted to keep her real name private, withholding it from the media in a try to keep fans and press away from her family member. Yet as her star has grown, so has her presence: She has her own Wikipedia page and fan forums really interested in her. “I used to habitually mention that my last name was Slater, and that my name is Catherine Slater. I still might legally change my name to that one day. Who knows,” she says. “But I think at this point privacy has gone out the window a little bit bit.”


Still, once an artist has climbed to a high enough rung on the ladder of internet fame, they’re often afforded more breathing room. Slater is using hers to open herself up to the world with this new era. She is aware it’s time for her to step out of the digital realm because the character she is and stand before each person as a three-dimensional real person whose songs are only getting better from here. “I feel like there’s routinely room to be emotional and to be funny and have different facets of my personality shine through,” she says. Right now fans will get to know more about who’s beyond the character.