Where Slayyyter’s ‘Troubled Paradise’ lets vulnerability into the room
Behind the album’s air horns, maximalist hooks and Y2K excess, Slayyyter’s 2021 debut makes room for anxiety, breakup fallout and an unusually exposed kind of pop songwriting.
Slayyyter’s ‘Troubled Paradise’ begins with ‘Self Destruct’, which Dork’s 2021 review memorably called “an air horn to the face”. It is an apt introduction to a record built from big gestures: high-gloss electronics, Y2K references, sex-positive punchlines and choruses determined to arrive at full volume. Yet the debut album’s most revealing quality is not simply that it can make excess entertaining. It is that its maximalism repeatedly carries emotions which are less secure: anxiety, isolation, unstable romance and the lingering mess of a breakup.