Slayyyter can now happily say the upcoming album is the project she’s most proud of, but it also came out of some dark nights of the soul. “I feel like it all started from a place of being like, ‘Fuck this music shit. This is the last album I’ve ever going to make, blah blah blah,’” she says. “In doing that, I started making music I loved so, so much. I was like, ‘Wait, I love doing this! I was just kidding!’”

And while it’s become something of a cliché for pop artists to describe their latest project as their more personal yet, in Slayyyter’s case, it rings true: the process of self-reflection she underwent while making it has left her feeling the happiest and most content she’s been in her career thus far. “When I started all of this music, I didn’t have the intention to be more personal, but I just kind of had a period of time where I felt very introspective about my life and my childhood and my teen years. What an incredible thing to be plucked out of St. Louis as a hair salon receptionist answering the phone, and having music find an audience online.”

“But, you know, it’s been a while,” she continues, after a pause. “I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and haven’t had a mainstream breakthrough moment. And I think that got in my head a lot. But then I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve been afraid to do this or do that. And so I started just being like, ‘I want to make this album that feels like a little bit of everything I love.’”

For an artist whose music is so brash and in-your-face—on “Daddy AF,” which memorably soundtracked a strip club scene in Anora, she sings gleefully about popping bottles before commanding a boy to “put it on your face”; on “Beat Up Chanel$,” she snarls a lyric about wanting “sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed”—it’s a surprise to discover that, in conversation, Slayyyter is thoughtful, softly-spoken, and self-effacing. She talks most enthusiastically, in fact, when shouting out the designers she worked with for her looks in the video, or the performers she cast to dance alongside her. “The girls in the video are all really incredible burlesque performers, and they make their own costumes, so I felt I had to take it upon myself to make my own costume,” she explains. (She recently took up sewing after finding that her hot glue gun pieces could no longer pass muster on camera.) “It took a month, but I love doing stuff like that. I put feathers on the headdress and I get really crafty.”

Essentially, while Slayyyter may have signed to a major label, she’s lost none of her DIY spirit. “I feel like I naturally, and not in an annoying way, have a kind of anti-establishment spirit, where I like doing things myself,” she says. “I reject the whole notion that being a great artist means that you need to have someone do your hair and your makeup and your styling and your everything.”