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.
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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.