Chloe Slater isn’t afraid to tell you how she feels

Chloe Slater sits on the floor of a grimy room, bathed in red light, cutting up, ripping and stuffing pieces of paper into her mouth. She pins the fragments she hasn’t chewed up and spat out on the wall behind her. On the sheets of A4 are screenshots of hate comments she’s received online; “what a unibrow. Girl looks like she eats onions,” one reads.

These scenes from the video for ‘Tiny Screens’, a jagged dive into the volatile nature of social media fame, offer an insight into the comments section of anyone who dares voice their opinion online these days. It’s a sight as familiar for everyday people who use internet spaces to discuss and debate as it is for artists like Slater, who pours her dissatisfaction with the world into the social commentary in her songs.

“I think a lot of people think I’m controversial or something, but my standpoint is that everyone deserves to be loved, have rights and exist in the world,” she tells NME. “I think that’s a pretty basic human rights sort of belief, but a lot of people disagree.”

Over the last year, the Manchester-based musician has had to deal with a lot of other people’s opinions. Since her breakthrough track, ‘24 Hours’, went viral on TikTok in early 2024, she’s used her infectious observations, like those on last year’s debut EP ‘You Can’t Put A Price On Fun’, to discuss topics like the plight of Generation Rent (‘Death Trap’) and the state of UK politics (‘Nothing Shines On This Island’). Those sharp songs have made her something of a lightning rod for hate and derision – and marked her as an exciting new voice in British indie who’s gone from playing gigs in Manchester’s small venues to supporting Kings Of Leon in an arena in Cologne and playing Glastonbury’s BBC Introducing stage for her first-ever festival experience.

“Everyone deserves to be loved, have rights and exist in the world”

Speaking out hasn’t always come naturally to Slater. Before she began using her music as an outlet for her anger at society, she struggled to share how she was feeling. Her anxiety around making her opinions known stemmed from both internalising the idea that women should be “soft and agreeable” and the environment that she grew up in.

“We were quite a calm, chill household, and we didn’t really ever argue about anything,” she explains, sitting by the window of a bustling east London pub. “When I have problems in my real life now or political things that I’m angry about, I do find it difficult to speak up about them because I never really developed that voice growing up. But I’m definitely starting to become a little bit more vocal in everyday life.”

A fluffy dog that’s been sitting quietly by its owner’s feet lets out a loud, shrill bark, as if to punctuate the point. “She is not agreeable; she is opinionated,” Slater notes with a laugh.

Part of Chloe Slater’s appeal is how much she feels like someone you could be – or perhaps already are – friends with: a slightly shy, quietly cool young woman just trying to make it through an increasingly stressful world. A year ago, the 21-year-old Bournemouth native was just another student, juggling uni assignments for a degree in music with part-time jobs in Greggs and The Crystal Maze Experience.

Now Slater is writing songs that are vibrant snapshots of the problems concerning her generation, as her fans and followers let her know in comments that marvel at just how precisely she’s captured how they’re feeling. But she wasn’t always so clued into social issues. In fact, Slater found the world of politics “boring” until she was 16 and started listening to artists like Sam Fender and Declan McKenna.

“They were quite politically vocal in their music, and I found it really interesting, so I started looking more into it,” she recalls. “My best friend from school, Hannah, was really into politics, and she would talk to me about it. But [being political] was never really put on me as a kid. I like that, though – it means my views are all my own and haven’t been influenced by my family. I went out and found them by myself.”

Slater had already started writing her own music three years before this political awakening. Before she evolved into an artist combining the youthful bite of early Wolf Alice and a grungier take on Wet Leg-esque sprechgesang, she’d been inspired by Taylor Swift to pick up the guitar and had started exorcising her teenage angst in songs that now make her cringe. “I started writing songs like her country era, singing in an American accent, which is so far from what I am,” she laughs. Recently, on a trip home, she found a book of her old lyrics. “They were like, ‘You’re gonna fly away / Not gonna care for another day’,” she recites with a wince. “Embarrassing!”

“Being political was never put on me as a kid – my views are all my own”

Her songwriting has developed impressively since. Slater’s songs are smart but not alienating, deftly weaving pop culture references into her lyrics (“Be grateful for what you’ve got ‘cause people are dying, Kim,” she sings sorrowfully in ‘Thomas Street’, lifting an infamous quote from Keeping Up With The Kardashians). And although she’s forthright with her opinions in her music, she shares them not from a high horse but as a person in the crowd also navigating these issues.

That’s the case with ‘Fig Tree’, one of the fizzing highlights of Slater’s second EP, ‘Love Me Please’, due for release tomorrow. “Give me a reason to hate myself, and I’ll take the lot,” she sighs, sinking into the insecurities perpetuated by social media beauty trends designed to keep us spending in the pursuit of eternal youth and cosmetic perfection. “As soon as I open TikTok, I get all these videos like, ‘Do you have a tech neck? Do you have hip dips?’” she says disdainfully. “I’m like, ‘I didn’t even know what that was – why are you giving me new [things to worry about]!?’”

The song’s bridge invokes ’90s movie Trainspotting and its iconic “choose life” monologue, Slater running through practices and procedures pushed on women to be skinnier, smoother, and shinier. “Choose pilates, liposuction, don’t forget to wear a bra,” she chides, “Don’t drink, don’t blink, choose diet soda, thin is in.”

With its laundry list of ideals and ‘choices’, ‘Fig Tree’ is an excoriation of choice feminism – the insistence that every individual decision a woman makes as feminist because they had the ability to make those choices – as it endures today. Online critique of choice feminism may seem played out, but society’s rapid regression means it can still feel like a valid form of empowerment. Consumerist lifestyles and aesthetics – “trad wife”, “clean girl”, “gym bunny” – have become constants on social media, as has the bombardment of influencer marketing that offers the illusion of choice – drop those unwanted pounds for you! – just as governments work to strip women of their fundamental rights.

Slater admits that choice feminism was probably her own entry point to feminism nearly a decade ago, but now – like many others – sees it as “a very shallow” form of the ideology. “Women should have autonomy over their bodies to do whatever they want to do, obviously,” she says, but rejects the idea that all choices are “inherently feminist and empowering” when they could be driven by internalised misogyny or subconsciously “submitting to a patriarchal standard”. As she sings in ‘Fig Tree’: “Choose to brag, become the centre of the problem that we swear is just the system, I assist him, I know I’m not being fair.”

SSlater also feels strongly about LGBTQ+ rights, environmental consciousness and supporting Palestine: “Our country is [helping fuel] a genocide against them.” A week before we meet, she holds her latest in an irregular series of fundraising gigs for Palestine and Lebanon, raising nearly £1500 for aid organisations. “I can’t believe we’re in 2025 and still talking about it,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s really important to me to speak out against that and for stopping the sales of arms from the UK to Israel.”

Although she’s committed to these causes, she’s also acutely aware that it won’t always be possible for her to be squeaky clean in her support of them. “Realistically, there’s no way to be fully ethical in a capitalist society,” she acknowledges. She doesn’t seem defeated by this but motivated to stick to her guns as much as possible: “I’m just trying to do the best that I can.”

On one of the new EP’s most anthemic, immediate tracks, she pledges to keep living by her values even in the face of staggering success: “If I make it, then I won’t straighten my teeth / I’m gonna give it all away,” she declares on ‘Sucker’. “I don’t think money should be hoarded,” she says plainly. “Obviously, I want to live fairly comfortably; I don’t want to be scraping by. But I think everyone deserves that.”

There’ll likely be those who’ll sneer at these views of Slater’s, too, but she’s well-prepared for trolls and haters these days. “My music is definitely very politicised, and I know that, but it’s made for a certain type of person with a certain set of morals,” she shrugs with a smile. “Not everyone has [the same ones], and that’s OK. That’s just how the world is.”

Chloe Slater’s ‘Love Me Please’ EP is released on February 4 via AWAL.

Listen to Chloe Slater’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Rhian Daly
Photography: Tom Oxley
Label: AWAL

The post Chloe Slater isn’t afraid to tell you how she feels appeared first on NME.