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Despite being labeled by fans as “underground,” rage rap has become a multi-million dollar business, filling out arenas with young men who believe Playboi Carti is god and moshpits are communion. (I believe this would make 42CEO one of the Four Evangelists.) But it’s not quite mainstream yet. Not in the sense of pop radio, Grammys season, or dinner table conversation. You won’t have much luck running up on someone in the park and asking them if they know who Yeat or Ken Carson is.
Well, if rage rap ever makes its way onto a Target store playlist, it might sound a little like Slayr. His November album Half Blood, recently re-released as the expanded BloodLuxe, checks all the boxes of the genre—roller-rink synths by way of F1LTHY, barreling flows by way of Uzi—then tears up the checklist every few minutes to try something new: a wub-wub EDM drop, a bath bomb of synth streaks. Slayr raps, sings, and screams across this thing, producing most of it himself with frequent contributions from the producer wa. If it were candy, BloodLuxe would be sour and sweet taffy that turns your tongue blue.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Beyond all the stomach-turning breakdowns, Slayr prioritizes the basics: tight song structure, soaring hooks, and expertly rapped verses. There are songs like “Racks” that are perfectly constructed genre fare but still exhibit a sense of play. Technique often supersedes feeling, though. Slayr’s dexterous, highly processed vocal runs on “Brand New” skip and skate and flutter around kangarooing 808s, taking cues from Harlem rapper Lunchbox. But you can feel the pain and strain in Lunchbox’s voice every time. Slayr sounds great, but it can sometimes seem like pure craft without the art; he doesn’t always give shape to feeling when he sings.
BloodLuxe sounds huge and goes down easy even while it’s still firmly rooted in the scene’s instincts. More, more, more seems to be the direction of the underground right now. Louder, noisier, more chaotic. Slayr’s “more” sounds like the arrangement of “Brain Fog”: 30 seconds of 8-bit snow globe music, then 40 seconds of rage rap, then 30 seconds of underscores-style pop EDM, then a cloud of synths that transition seamlessly into the next track. I can’t get with all of the breakdowns on BloodLuxe, especially the metal switch-ups that sound like he typed “Playboi Carti tour vibes” into Suno, but I respect the audacity to throw everything at the wall.
Scanning his album titles over the years—Chaos [B4 Gaia], Gaia, Gaia 2, Half Blood—you’ll notice that Slayr is heavily into Greek mythology. He amassed his knowledge of the pantheon, demigods, and the creation of the world through reading Percy Jackson books and playing God of War. All throughout his adolescence in Philadelphia, he got lost in the worlds of video games like Sonic Colors and Kingdom Hearts. And in an interview with Kids Take Over, he credits video game OSTs for getting him into making music. Gaming is inseparable from what Slayr does on BloodLuxe. The Half Blood album art is inspired by the Japanese horror game Corpse Party. And you can hear the influence on songs like “Love Blur,” when the melodies turn extra syrupy, and “Demigod,” where he approximates side-scrolling madness through sound.
There’s a bit of a throwback feel to Slayr’s music, too, a formalist approach that helps him cuts through the noise. A lineage of SoundCloud rap auteurs courses through Half Blood—XXXTentacion, Uzi, Juice WRLD—with the most apparent point of reference being Lil Tecca. (Those genre-bending song transitions? A page straight from the book of TEC.) The restlessness harkens back to pandemic-era digicore, and I even hear a little early pluggnb in his crooning. He’s in conversation with artists like Lucy Bedroque and Jane Remover, locating the squishy heart within the hypermasculine armor of rage rap. The throughline between all three is Lil Uzi Vert: On “Died But Came Back,” when Slayr duets with a cutesy Kasane Teto vocaloid over a seething bassline, it’s sounds like he excavated the shards of beauty from Uzi’s dud Pink Tape.
Often the power of these songs is not in the lyrics but in the delivery: the way Slayr goes full-throttle on “Never Go Down” and “Racks,” the irresistible singalong melodies of “Sloppy Joe” and “Holding.” There’s puffed-out braggadocio, trips to space fueled by drug cocktails, imaginary Dracs getting flashed, bitter jabs at exes, all standard underground rap fodder that can start to turn rote. When he gets real, the writing is more compelling. “The Sky” is a dramatic Auto-Tune ballad with Mike Dean-type keyboard noodling that complicates teenage love with the pressures of burgeoning success.
His songs can sometimes feel gamified, speed-ran, like they were scientifically woven together in a DAW to trigger dopamine rushes. It’s telling that Slayr frequently wins over the judges in Plaqueboymax’s Song Wars—his music is crowd-pleasing, sharply constructed, easy on the ears. Despite the love from streamers, we are currently witnessing the Labours of Slayr, a massive wave of hate and ridicule from underground listeners who claim that he, among other atrocities, makes “Steven Universe music,” has “negative aura,” and faked tears during a performance in L.A. It’s all pretty dumb and rooted in engagement farming. But there’s a kernel of truth here about authenticity: You can be talented beyond your years, but talent alone is the stuff of sports, not art.
