Song Review: Slayyyter's “Out Of Time”
Summer 2019 is distilled in my memory as blush-pink evenings of darting from my bedroom in the suburbs to my parents’ electric-blue car to my city's nightclubs - streaky Xs reaching across the backs of my hands. Hyper-glam popstar Kim Petras' Turn Off the Light, Vol. 1 had come out the Autumn-before, and indie pop’s siren on the half-shell Lana Del Rey spent that Winter and Spring teasing out the singles off her forthcoming Norman Fucking Rockwell! Some wintry day, somewhere in cyberspace I stumbled upon the tiara-wearing Y2K-starlet Slayyyter – her candy-coated and rhinestone-bedazzled Soundcloud-produced singles, then soundtracking my blush-pink evenings in the Summer. Her June 2023 single “Out Of Time” is, sonically-speaking, a scoop of Slayyyter’s signature sugary-sweet and electrically-pulsating pop with a coating of disco poured on top. A rich and pouncing drum-beat and deep bass chords add body to the track, and shimmering sounds run after her voice in the chorus. The single’s lyrics start out in the vein of her Soundcloud singles’ that perked up and delighted my senses in the first place: “She’s a real good girl when the sun goes down at night / Got her lipstick on and she’s singing that song / ‘Cause she really wants a piece of that life.” “Say, ‘Good night’ / Angel eyes / You could be / Out of time,” snake up the chorus, as Slayyyter puts to words her song’s bewitching femme seductress luring in that night’s paramour on the dancefloor.
In the second verse the blinding glitz of her seductress’ glamorous and sybaritic life is shot through, “Two more minutes, three more hours ‘tile she lose it all / Got no one left to call / No one notices, make-up runs from her eyes… / She hates herself, but if they all love her, then she don’t mind.” “Out Of Time’s” soundscape remains its glossily ebullient self, thus heaping tension onto each tragic turn of the song’s story. The single’s second chorus eerily distorts the hook of her first chorus, to transform the tantalizing call to become Slayyyter’s ‘Angel eyes’ or one of her lucky captives into a warning not to be bewitched by “that life” of surface beauty, ephemeral, cheap thrills, and relying on the spoils of one’s youth, beauty and status that ‘Angel eyes’ is trapped in – “Say, ‘Good night’… / Angel eyes / You could be / Out of time.” Chilling ticks of a clock blare and echo after the second chorus’ last words, “(I’m ou-ou-out of time),” and every element of the single’s soundscape momentarily falls out as the singer breathes atop hollow silence, to sobering effect, “Better say goodnight (I’m ou-ou-out of time).” Despite the rich, spinning and syrupy-sweet soundscape flooding back to grasp Slayyyter’s voice before she is finished letting out the bridge’s last word, the full and intoxicating sonic scope, due to its relationship with the single’s raw and clandestine-seeming bridge, is incapable of ensnaring the listener back into a dreamy, mindless state. Anxiously tossed in amongst the last chorus’ cool and slinky, “Say, ‘Good night’ / Angel eyes / You could be / Out of time,” are the macabre and foreboding utterances, “You’re under pressure, baby,” and “(You could be it now, baby).” If the fairytale draw of possessing ‘Angel eyes’’ iridescent and spotless life is threaded across Slayyyter’s earliest singles, 2023’s “Out of Time” shoots bullets through such an imagining of the sort of life that ‘Angel eyes’ has found herself in and is not yet able to make her way out of.
Slayyyter’s “Out Of Time”: https://slayyyter.lnk.to/outoftime
