Chloe Slater

Chloe Slater grew up in Bournemouth, a seaside town on the south coast of England that empties in winter and rarely attracted touring bands. She has spoken about the hunger that environment created, the particular restlessness of a teenager who needed music to take her somewhere else. She picked up acoustic guitar at thirteen, switched to electric, and after moving to Manchester for university found her voice on the city's open mic circuit. She started working out what she actually wanted to say.

What she wanted to say turned out to be quite a lot. Her debut single, "Sinking Feeling!", came in 2023, followed by "24 Hours" in early 2024, a sharp-elbowed commentary on influencer culture that brought her to BBC Radio 1's attention: her track "Price On Fun" was selected as BBC Introducing Track of the Week. By May 2024 she released her first EP, "You Can't Put A Price On Fun," a five-track set on Stolen Juice (an AWAL imprint), that took aim at landlords, the class divide, and the particular texture of Gen Z life in post-Brexit Britain. NME called her "the firebrand songwriter that's about to be everywhere."

Her second EP, "Love Me Please," arrived in February 2025 and pushed further into the personal without letting go of the political. It included "Tiny Screens," a loud, thrashy song about the fickle logic of internet fame, and "Fig Tree," which takes its title from Sylvia Plath's fig tree analogy in The Bell Jar and uses it to explore choice feminism and the pressures placed on women in a culture obsessed with appearances. Reviewers reached for words like "riotous" and "raw" and praised its ability to "grab you by the collar and make its case with both whip-smart intelligence and a good hard shake of pure, unbridled attitude." She sold out her first headline tour in 2025 and performed at Glastonbury on the BBC Music Introducing Stage.

"War Crimes," released in November 2025, was her first openly protest-driven song, written in response to the ongoing situation in Gaza and the UK government's response to it. The artwork was created by Palestinian artist Ahmed Al Da'alsa, with proceeds from accompanying merchandise going to support his family. The release marked a new directness in her writing: the same sharp instincts, applied without any softening.

Her debut album, "Riot Youth," assembles all of this into a single ten-track statement. The lead single, "Southern Youth," is about Bournemouth itself: the place she came from and the feeling of wanting to leave it. Her own description of the song, as "a tale of the classic angsty teenager to homesick adult pipeline," captures the doubled emotion perfectly. "Ugly" takes on consumer culture and beauty standards with the same clarity that has run through her work from the beginning. Produced by long-term collaborator Jack Shuter alongside Ash Workman, whose credits include Metronomy and Stealing Sheep, the record aims for a bigger, more rock-forward sound, and the music delivers. Comparisons to Sam Fender, Declan McKenna, and Wolf Alice are well-earned: Slater makes guitar music that thinks, and she does it without flinching.