Who Is Slayr? How the Teenage Philly Rapper Behind 'Half Blood' Became Rage Rap’s Breakout Star

"Who's number one?" Slayr asks almost immediately after learning he's No. 2 on our Best Rappers in Their Teens list.

"Aight for sure. I mean that ain't bad. The n***a younger than me," he says, referring to BabyChiefDoIt, who topped this year's list. Before declaring that he actually deserves the top top spot.

Slayr’s confidence isn’t misplaced.

Since the list was published, readers have reranked him No. 1. And the music backs it up. On his breakout album Half Blood, he pushes rage beyond its usual boundaries, blending melodic, upbeat chord progressions, rock-inspired drum interludes, and hardcore EDM breakdowns into something that sounds less like a collage than a blueprint.

But there’s more to Slayr than his ability to blend genres. Where some of his contemporaries are still finding their footing, the Philadelphia rapper has a clear sense of his artistic identity. He draws heavily from anime, manga, and video games—from Mob Psycho 100 to Final Fantasy—and those influences show up everywhere: his samples, his album artwork, and his video concepts, including his “Eyesight” video with Lyrical Lemonade.

But this individuality also leaves him feeling like an outcast in an underground scene where being cool means fitting a certain mold.

“I don’t create music with as much malice as I used to earlier this year, but you know, n****s just hate,” Slayr tells Complex over Zoom. “You’re still gonna make your good music no matter what. That’s all that matters.”

Slayr’s relationship with music began when he was five, though it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. Born Evan McDonald, the 19-year-old remembers his mother handing him a keyboard he never asked for.

“I was five and my mom just gave me a keyboard for my birthday, or it was for Christmas, and I never asked for it or wanted that shit,” he says. “So it was kind of against my will. She made me start doing practices and fucking online videos learning shit.”

While he wanted to be outside, she kept him indoors learning chords on a knockoff Yamaha, or as Slayr puts it, “the best bootleg shit you could find.”

But what began as a chore grew into a real fascination. One of his earliest inspirations came from an unlikely place: Sonic Colors, a game he played on his Nintendo DS. The soundtrack caught his ear, and it made him want to figure out how it worked.

“It was something about the music that really inspired me, but I wasn’t making music yet. I just had the whole idea of like, ‘Damn, music is pretty cool. Let me dissect the shit,’” he says. “So I just went on YouTube. I was listening to music for hours. That’d be my whole day.”

By seven, Slayr was discovering rock bands like Skillet and Evanescence on YouTube, developing a taste for heavier sounds that would later find their way into his own music. Traces of those early influences show up in the outro of his standout track “Sloppy Joe” and the rock-inspired interlude on “Turn It Up.”

At school, he wasn’t especially popular, but he wasn’t an outcast either. (“I was just normal, bro,” he said.) His friends weren’t freestyling at lunch, but they were “making beats at the lunch table for sure.”

And then rap entered the picture—through one of the defining moments of the SoundCloud era: XXL’s 2016 Freshman Class, which included Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, Kodak Black, Lil Yachty, and Denzel Curry. Uzi, in particular, left a lasting impression.

“I watched the XXL Freshman and I was like, ‘Damn, this n***a is crazy.’ That freestyle [Uzi] did there was one of my favorite shits,” he says. “I would recite that shit every day, and then I just got into [his music] after.”

That opened the door to the South Florida SoundCloud scene, particularly XXXTENTACION, Ski Mask the Slump God, and their Members Only collective. Songs like XXXTENTACION’s “Look at Me!” and “Off the Wall!” introduced him to a more aggressive sound.

“It instantly turned the switch. I’m into this hard shit, like, I need some hard music,” he says. “When X died, I kind of felt a spark. I was like, ‘I lowkey want to make music now. Let me just try that shit out.’ And I was making a lot of X clone music…Pretty much where my whole sound evolved from: Juice WRLD, a bit of Uzi, [and] a bit of the flows from Ski and X.”

Years later, when Slayr met DJ Scheme, a longtime collaborator of X and Ski Mask, he made sure to tell him: “Y’all n***s changed my life.”

Like much of the underground, Slayr has been drawing from Playboi Carti, who’s become the blueprint for the frenetic energy coming out of the scene. “You can tell when it comes to Carti that it’s too easy for the nigga to do it, and it still comes off as crazy,” he says. Learning that much of Carti’s music was freestyled only deepened his appreciation. “When I learned that, I was like, wow. You can make shit like [...] ‘Stop Breathing’ just going in?” Slayr takes a similar approach in the booth, often freestyling his verses and punching in as he goes.

He credits Carti and the Opium collective with shaping everything from how artists dress to who they work with. “They shaped how n****s dress, shaped how niggas view rage, shaped how n****s make rage,” he says. “They the Gods of this shit.”

During the pandemic, Slayr immersed himself further in the underground while continuing to experiment with his own music. “The covid years was my introduction to like the underground as it is because I got into Faygo, Summrs, and KanKan,” he said.

His first taste of underground recognition came in 2022 with “FOURTH GEAR CYPHER!,” a collaboration with Yung Fazo and several other artists that began as a remix of Carti’s “Rockstar Made.” At the time, he was still releasing music under the name Slayer77.

He kept building a following, eventually becoming a regular on PlaqueBoyMax’s Song Wars, and kept fans fed with a steady stream of releases, averaging roughly two projects a year.

Among them was his 2023 album Gaia, which found him experimenting with orchestral sounds. Still, despite his growing presence in the underground, Slayr wasn’t convinced rapping would become his career. “I was already good at making music so I would just put that into a college professionLike composing or like [sound] engineering or some shit,” he says.

That uncertainty began to fade with Half Blood, which he released last year while still in high school. It was his breakout, led by the effortlessly catchy “Sloppy Joe,” which has since accumulated more than 20 million streams on Spotify.

What makes Half Blood particularly impressive is how much of it Slayr did himself. Working with a handful of co-producers, he handled the writing, recording, mixing, and mastering. The result was a project he describes as a testament to “everything I could do.”

Half Blood and the 2026 deluxe edition were also a hit crtically, earning has earned praise from critics, including YouTube critic Anthony Fantano, whose positive review Slayr says he was “honored” to receive.

After the success of Half Blood, Slayr isn't necessarily looking to reinvent himself. Instead, he's focused on refining the sound that brought him this far. "My whole goal now is to just continue with what I got," he explains. "I feel like I'm in a way easier spot if I just kind of stick to my roots instead of trying to be bigger and grander.” Slayr says his next project is being built around a clearer concept.

"I feel like this concept is way more upfront than my previous shit," he says. "There's a real deal thing going on more than just me throwing shit against the wall hoping it worked."

"I'm on my solo shit for sure. I'm feeling very soloist right now," he answers when asked about features on the project. Despite everything he's accomplished, Slayr is still only 19, figuring out who he wants to be as an artist and where he wants to take his music. He's not ready to reveal much about what's next, but he offers one final tease.

"It's a magical sight, man, it's a magical sight."