“If it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have a following or any of what I have,” Catherine Slater tells Apple Music. “Internet fame is a funny, crazy thing.” The story of the St. Louis artist’s rise to Insta-celebrity began with her stage moniker. “My name had nothing to do with the word 'slay',” she says. “Adding the Ys just helped me get all my Twitter and Instagram handles.” Armed with a meme-friendly name and her digital hits, Slayyyter’s debut mixtape is a glam-pop embrace of sexuality in all its forms. Slayyyter moves from nightclub hook-ups (“Touch My Body”) to cybersex (“E-Boy” featuring That Kid) and shattering gender roles (“Daddy AF”). While Slater is bracingly self-deprecating about her appeal (“If I didn't post pictures of myself, I don't know if I would have listeners”), there’s plenty more to it than that. Let Slater guide you track by track through her mixtape. BFF (feat. Ayesha Erotica) “Working with her [Ayesha Erotica] is incredible. She's a genius, and there’s nothing else like her production. Nowadays you don't hear many songs about your friends and your girls, everything’s about love and guys. I have songs like that on this project too, but I wanted the first song to be something like…bam! ‘Girls. Fuck your ex, this is about us.’ It’s a celebration of friendship to intro the mixtape.” Mine “This track’s less of a Myspace highly compressed sound like my other music and is a classic pop song, so it was cool that people liked it so much when it came out. It's one of the few on the mixtape that I didn't have a heavy hand in writing. It was originally a male vocal and I said, ‘It reminds me of this person I have a crush on. Can I have this?’ I didn't think I was going to get it and then it became my biggest song, so that’s been wild. It's a sweet and tender love song about meeting someone on a night out.” Alone “The first song is about friendship, then there’s a love song, and this is my angry, furious song. I heard the beat and it reminded me of old Britney Spears. It has the most energy of everything on the album. When people think of my music, this is the quote-unquote ‘critically acclaimed one’, because the production is really crazy and out there.” Candy “I don’t use any metaphors. I just went straight for what I was trying to say. People find it to be a bit gross, which I think is funny because I hear rap songs with the most insanely vulgar lyrics all the time but when it's a girl doing it, it's like, 'She's trashy, she's nasty.’ My mom was definitely not pleased with this song, so I had to call her and say, ‘It's a character.’” Cha Ching “The lyrics on this song are nonsensical at points. Some of it alludes to being broke, then other times I'm saying I’m rich or fake money. It’s a weird flex song. A lot of people asked me if this is a diss track, but I can't even tell you what it's about because I really don't know. Some of the lyrics, like ‘Smoking all your cheese, but I got your breakfast,’ I really don't know what it's about, but it just flows.” Devil “The lyric ‘People call me toxic’ has two meanings. Part of it was a fun wink to Britney, but also in relationships in my life, I've been told that I'm not easy to get along with or that I'm a toxic female entity. I remember the guy I wrote ‘Alone’ about, he said, ‘You're such a snake for writing that song.’ Being the devil woman to other people, it’s fun. It makes me feel like I'm head bitch in charge. I wanted to make a song from that extreme point of view. The lyric ‘Don't get too close to me because I'm going to hurt you,’ that's my whole thing.” Ur Man “I won't get into too much detail, because I already got a text after the mixtape came out saying how I'm evil for writing this song. I was out at a bar and this guy was bartending. He gave me a drink and was being weird, then tried to scoot me back to his apartment. I was totally not interested. The next day his girlfriend’s friends were saying, ‘You tried cheating. You're a whore, go and die.’ I just thought, ‘Can all of you just leave me alone? I don't want your man.’ I went to LA and knew I wanted to make a Destiny's Child-style song about it.” Daddy AF “This is a fantasy flex song about being in the club. On this mixtape, it's definitely the most modern. The music influence is more trap than it is early ’00s—it's so raunchy and dirty. I think it's cool to play with gender roles by being a girl and singing, ‘I feel daddy as fuck.’ We're in a culture where girls think guys are daddy this and that, but I think, ‘No, you can be the dominant one in your romantic life, you can be the daddy!’ I have a pretty large LGBTQ following, and that's a term that everyone gets. Everyone understands the dominance when I'm saying that, so it’s become an anthem for people feeling themselves, and I love that.” Motorcycle “I recorded half of this in LA and half in my little home recording closet in St. Louis, Missouri. I remember writing the hook part but couldn’t finish the rest. Then I was in my closet one day and I thought of these verses with a Bret Michaels Rock of Love [American reality TV show] flavour. I just went with it and gave a nod to someone I knew that had a tattoo on their chest like in the song. The song ended up making it on this mixtape. I’m really happy because it's probably my favourite song. But it almost didn't, so thank god, right?” Celebrity “I'll go places sometimes and get recognised, but when I go home to St. Louis, I live with my mom and that's my normal life. I have one foot in this world and then the rest of me not in it. I'm famous now, I'm a celebrity, but I'm really not. I love reality show culture. In the early ’00s when it really started, people thought they were more famous than they were, and that's how I feel. I have shows where people are there to see me and I feel like a star, then the next day I go to lunch with my friend and it's like I'm no one.” Tattoo “This song is the purest, most concentrated sugary form of pop that I have on this mixtape. It’s got such a perfect title, because I have my tattoo on the cover. The tramp stamp that says ‘Slayyyter’ [on the album artwork] is not actually real. A lot of people did think it was real, so that's funny, but my mom would have killed me if I got that done. I think getting a tattoo of someone's name is tacky, so I thought it'd be funny to make a song where you're basically begging someone, ‘Please get my name tattooed on you.’” E-Boy (feat. That Kid) “I used to be pretty heavy on the internet. It was an escape from my boring life in St. Louis. I would meet all kinds of people, and sometimes I’d get a crush on someone online and talk for a little bit. You're not dating for real, but you have a little flirtationship. I also tied it into camming, as I used to do internet sex. I became this fantasy girl that wasn't really me but people would pay money to have camming sessions or cybersex with me. I'm pretty open about that time in my life. I don't have secrets or anything to hide. The bridge makes me laugh, because the whole time you think it's a song about cyber love, then I'm like, ‘Give me all your money.’” Touch My Body “There are four songs on here that are all about the same person. It came from a place of longing, and it's such a delicate-sounding dance track. It’s about when you want someone to hit you up to go out at night because you want to see them and hook up with them. There's something beautiful about that, when you're not fully in love with a person yet but you want to be physical and hope they see you out at the club by chance. I love a tender pop song that you can dance to. ‘Mine’ is the same—there's something sad about both of them. When you want someone to be yours so badly but they aren't, you think, ‘All right, I guess we're just hooking up because that's what millennials do, so let's do that even though I really like you.’” Ghosttt “I thought it was the perfect end to this project, just because the original [the track was originally released in 2018] is so attitude. It’s not necessarily a remix, but we flipped it. I wanted to have a sad moment because I’m an emotional person. I get down and depressed, and this mixtape is energy and happy pop. This mixtape tells a story and the ending is about getting ghosted and wondering where someone went. In the bridge, I say something about how I'm living in my dreams. Which is true, I'm out here now, doing my thing with music, but there's still something sad to be said about love lost.”