I feel like I’ve gone through so many things during lockdown, like moving to LA and becoming acclimatised to the city. One hobby I picked up was actually bedazzling, or buying rhinestones and gluing them on to things. I got super into it. I’ve even started making lots of stuff for future videos and photoshoots, which is pretty funny. 

Yeah, everything in my apartment has rhinestones all over it.

St Louis, Missouri. Kind of a far move that I’ve made. I grew up there my whole life in a small, mid-west suburb. [It was] really quiet, and a kind of small town vibe. That’s where everything started from, just me trying to get out of there.

Definitely. I feel like my persona is a bit more sexual and very over the top. I actually have social anxiety so in real life I’m honestly quite shy. My music gives me a bit of an edge in that it sounds like I’m this outgoing, party person, but it’s the polar opposite of who I am. It’s a bit like an alter ego.

I don’t know if it helps me work through it, honestly. But sometimes music is like a mask, although a helpful one. I feel a lot cooler when I’m making songs, when I’m writing them and thinking of raps to say. It helps me, naturally, to be more confident in myself.

No, you hit the nail on the head! That’s exactly the reason that I wanted to use Dorothy. The album is a snapshot of my life over the past two years, and in a way I was swept up by this crazy tornado, like Dorothy, and put in this crazy city and music industry. It still doesn’t seem real. It feels very dreamlike.
In the album, and in songs like Clouds, there’s a lot of longing to go back home. (There really is no place like home.) It can feel really isolating as an artist making music, so it made the most sense having The Wizard of Oz’s aesthetics being the visual forefront of the sound.
It does feel really fitting. Osegbu directed the video for the track Troubled Paradise, too. The video itself feels like a really momentous pop moment, with the jungle set, leopard-print bodysuit and dancing in the rain.

My reference for the video was really random. You know those corny, 1990s marine paintings – they would always be of a leopard, palm trees, the moon, or a sunset over the ocean – ones that you would buy on vacation in little stores on beach towns? Yeah, I was obsessed with those kinds of paintings. I remember when I was making Troubled Paradise I’d tell people that it sounded like one of them, and everyone would always respond like: ‘What are you talking about?’. I don’t know how, but it just sounds like one of those paintings to me. Very jungle-esque. So we referenced those images a lot, and in the end produced this Garden of Eden, paradisical feeling.

Absolutely. Visuals are just as important to me as the music itself. If I can’t see a music video play out in my head when I’m making a song, then the song isn’t good enough or enough of a hit. I have to see the visual in my head. And, even though there isn’t a visual for every song on the album, there could be. In my head, I could plan a video for each.

Well, I feel like there are a few things going on in the album. But yes, it is mainly about one relationship.

Absolutely. Music helps me get over anything. If I feel something really intensely – whether that’s anger, jealousy, feeling love for something, or feeling depressed – songs help me navigate through it. You can write it all down, turn it into something cool for a three-minute piece of music, and then be finished with it. After that, the emotion kind of goes away.
As you said, writing the album completely helped me to get over somebody who wasn’t very good for me. After writing the album, I was at peace with everything. I even went back to them and was like, ‘hey, look, I wrote this album about you’, and it was fine. We’ve laughed about it since. Writing music has been the most therapeutic relationship I’ve ever had.

Honestly, it’s funny because I wasn’t even trying to make something contrasting, I just thought the beat sounded very sad. The beat is so dance-y, though, and after fully making it and listening back I was like, ‘oh, this is like a Robyn track!’. It’s very sad lyricism over something that’s very fun to dance to. I was in a really sad mood when I wrote it, and that’s what came to mind; all morning and all day long, when I was alone in my Airbnb, I kept getting this intense imposter syndrome. The track was also one of the last songs that I made for the album (during pandemic times) and it became one of my favourites. And even though it’s not the title track, it set the tone for the entire album and embodies its whole theme – me being sad. (laughs).

You took the words right out of my mouth. A musician too, of course.
I definitely have come to terms with it. All the feelings I had of feeling like I didn’t belong to the music industry shifted as soon as I made this project. To me, at least, it’s a damn good album. I did a good job, and I feel really proud of making it. After making it, my life became a little less troubled because it felt like I was supposed to be doing this. It’s okay if I’m not the best singer, because I’m still an artist worthy of making music as a career. I definitely feel like life has got a little sweeter following the sad zone of all those songs, which is nice too. Sometimes you have to create something to figure out what makes you happy.

It’s so funny because when I think about when I wrote this song, it was the most un-sexy situation ever. I was laying under the covers, about to go to bed, just tapping on my phone and laughing away to myself. I literally wrote it on my friend’s couch in LA, before I really got my own place, wearing my pyjamas and glasses. So, very unsexy. The stuff on my earlier mixtape was very sexual, so I thought people would be pissed off if I didn’t have anything talking about being a slut. I needed the one slut song for the girls.

Absolutely.

Yeah! Looking at forums and different places, I really read into when people are criticising me, especially my music. After my mixtape, people called me a one-trick pony, but I wanted to show people that I have actual emotions, and that I can put these emotions into music and they’ll actually make good songs. So, I feel like I did want to show a different side, but I also wasn’t trying to force it too much. I’ve naturally moved into this space.

I feel like I go through phases of not using it at all, to using it every day. I’m back into tweeting every day at the minute, though. Without Twitter, or stan Twitter specifically, I wouldn’t be here with a music career or a platform. It’s been a crazy thing that I’ve used to promote myself and my music throughout the years, but I use it a bit differently now, where I just talk about my music and myself. (I used to be really funny) It’s been pretty wild to see this all happen from Twitter alone, so I still love it and feel like it’s a great tool. My personality is also very Twitter based. Even with lyrics in the songs: I’m not trying to reference the platform, it’s just how I talk now. My personality is Twitter.

Literally! I’m always like, ‘let’s go serve bitch, let’s go’.

Honestly, it does feel like that. People give attention to whoever everyone decides is ‘cool’ or ‘good’. Like, this week we like this artist; she’s cool, listen to her music. Then next week, someone else blows up. That can turn into, ‘oh, we hate her’, just as fast, though. But yeah, it definitely does feel like that.

Thank you! It’s so funny because he was one of the first people I came across on Twitter when I started my music projects. I put out my first song without any official album art – I might have made something on Photoshop – but he was like: ‘no, let’s make something that looks good’. Then he started doing all my single covers, which gave me such a cool visual identity. He’s such a cool 3D artist, and at the time the 3D art made me look a lot cooler than I was. People were like, ‘what is this, is she on a label?’. In reality, I’d just hit up my friend Josh (Glitchmood) and bought some single art after getting paid that week, working my little receptionist job.

Yeah! I was a receptionist at a hair salon, which was the last normal job that I had. Before that, I was a waitress at a sushi restaurant. Before my music hit off, I was doing this little receptionist desk job, making old ladies’ hair appointments. I had to eventually quit because my music was hitting off, and I kept taking time off work to go to New York and LA to perform these shows.

I feel like it’s inspiring. I hope people know that it really is possible to do whatever they want. I come from very, very humble beginnings. I do not have rich parents, I do not have any connections in the music industry whatsoever. My dad wasn’t even really around growing up, it was just me, my mum and my sister. For all this to happen, it’s like, you don’t have to have connections or know people. All you need to do is make cool shit. If you market yourself online, and there are so many different ways to do it, there’s no limit to what you can do.

Yeah, I mean, we’re in this time where there are so many ‘industry plants’ (I actually think that’s such a stupid phrase, and I hate to say it). But what I mean is it doesn’t always have to be that way. You can achieve home-grown success with what you do.

Absolutely. It’s a nod and a wink to what my next chapter of music will be. Being in love, being hopeful, feeling that you’re right where you’re supposed to be all of a sudden. In the album, Cowboys is a pretty bitter song about getting ghosted, and Troubled Paradise is a ‘how could you do this to me!’ break-up song. Letters was the very last song I made for the album, and I felt very different that kind of day. I had something different to say, and Nate Campany, one of the producers, started playing the guitar, I started singing melodies, and I just felt that it was really special. It’s a send-off into the next era of Slayyyter. Being in love, having a valentine again.

Other than the album, I actually have a lot of upcoming music. I’ve made quite a hefty head-start on the next project, and I have quite a bit of music in the vault. I’m also planning shows right now, too. Hopefully I’ll have another album out before I go on tour, but the Troubled Paradise live show is going to be quite an event! Hopefully everyone can look forward to that.

I just got my passport, so I’m ready to take this shit international. Let’s go!