Album: No Bad Slays
Artist: Slayloverboy

Southern California alt-rapper, Slayloverboy, has released his newest album No Bad Slays. The album is available for streaming anywhere you get your music.

Slayloverboy has also released music videos for several of the tracks, including “Where Do We Go,” and “My Life is a Horror Movie.” Of the single, “Where Do We Go”, Slay says, “This song basically talks about my early journey with music and basically thanking my girlfriend for always sticking with me even when we can’t physically be with each other.”

The album consists of ten tracks: Where Do We Go, Born to Lose, Idk Where I Been Lately (featuring Sybyr), 2 Die 4, Nobody Even Say What’s up No More, I Feel Like I’m Dreaming, FML Anthem, Chain Smokin’ (featuring Bobby Raps), Night Crawler, and Pain Killer.

All of the songs clock in at three minutes or less, with a few songs being around a minute and thirty seconds, and the average being around two minutes and thirty seconds. Personally, I think when all the songs on an album are short, it can seem like a lack of effort on the artist’s part. It feels like at least some of the tracks could have been developed more.

Slayloverboy reminds me of Soundcloud/emo rappers like Lil Peep and Lil Xan—mumble, monotone, sad-boy rap that sounds like it was mixed in their bedroom. More significantly, Slayloverboy reminds me of these artists because they have all curated their content to project the image of a drug addict, “barred out” on Xanax (brand name of a prescription anxiety medication, benzodiazepine) and drinking lean (the street name for a mixture of codeine-promethazine cough syrup and pop).

25-year-old producer DJ Fu produces songs for Schoolboy Q, Meek Mill, and Lil Xan; the latter who made his name, quite literally, through his links with drugs, and someone Fu considers to be one of his “best friends”. Fu was quoted in Dazed as saying, “It’s wild because in the 1980s and 1990s it was attractive to be the entrepreneurial dope dealer, but now it’s cooler for rappers to be the actual drug addicts; it’s a whole different flip. At one point, you were looked at as crazy and completely discredited if you were addicted to drugs, but now it’s cool to be barred out. It’s glorified. If LeBron wears Jordans then everyone wants to buy those sneakers, and it’s the same with rap. If Future is rapping about […] codeine, then people will want to imitate him as he’s the king.”

This generation of rappers is rapidly dying due to drug overdoses (Lil Peep, Mac Miller, Juice Wrld, to name a recent few). In Canada, it’s estimated eleven people a day are dying from an overdose. Furthermore, young Canadians aged 15 to 24 are the fastest-growing population requiring hospital care from opioid overdoses.

Now, I don’t know much of anything about Slayloverboy. I don’t know if he actually has a drug addiction, if he casually uses drugs, or if he’s simply projecting this image for the followers. I do know that the opioid crisis is nothing to play around with, and I can’t morally agree with artists promoting doing these kinds of drugs to young people.  But you can still check out Slayloverboy on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.