On first appearances, Chloe Slater seems like a made-for-success, indie rock star. The 22-year-old’s songs are addictive and self assured: their choruses, social commentary and self-awareness placing somewhere between Sam Fender, Declan McKenna and Phoebe Bridgers. Off the back of two critically acclaimed EPs, the viral success of the single 24 Hours, performances at Tramlines and Glastonbury, Slater sold out her first headline tour in 2025. Despite not yet having released a debut album, her TikTok reels have accrued almost two million likes.
But a deeper listen reveals something more striking, setting Slater apart from any number of social media-marketed, young songwriters. It is hinted, first, in her songs’ titles. There is Death Trap (a critique of rental housing), Nothing Shines on This Island (exploring British class inequality), and War Crimes (lambasting government complicity in the Gaza genocide). A listen to Slater’s two EPs reveals a lyricism notable for its political depth. On Death Trap, Slater tackles the housing crisis in the first person, from the perspective of someone living in a mouldy rental:
I sign the petitions
and they don’t get read ’
Cause the council don’t care if the people drop dead
They won’t tax their friends,
but they’ll fine all mine
No point in saving,
we’ll rent till we die
On Nothing Shines on This Island, she depicts the other side of rentier capitalism – a wealthy student oblivious to his privilege as a beneficiary of inherited wealth:
He’s got his contacts in the monarchy
Makes a killing from his passed-down property
Songs of dissent
Chloe Slater writes political songs. Protest songs. To understand the appeal of this genre is to understand the politics of young Britain today.
The generational divide in British politics is often explained away as typical: young people lean left and grow conservative with age. But this assumption simplifies a more nuanced reality. While it has generally held true historically that the young have been more supportive of Labour, in the early Thatcher years, the youngest voters were more likely to vote Conservative. Even as recently as 2010, young millennial voters were evenly split between Tory, Labour and Lib Dem.
In a market swamped by banal, identikit material, songs combining generational anger with Slater’s knack for viral marketing cut through
It is only in the past decade or so that a stark divide has emerged along generational lines – driven by stagnating living standards and successive recessions. In the Corbyn years, younger age was an overwhelming predictor of support for the leftist incarnation of Labour. But more recent polls show a surge of youth support for Zack Polanski’s Green Party. In many respects more radical than Corbyn’s Labour, Polanski’s Greens have pledged to abolish private landlordism, implement a £15 minimum wage and pursue a wealth tax.
Anthems for a (Gen Z) revolution?
Private landlords form just one target of Slater’s ire. Others include dodgy bosses (‘He pays minimum wage, and he wears black tie’), right-wing politicians (‘It’s all a money-making scheme and you’re a bandit / Of the upper middle class and its cabinet’) and Sir Keir Starmer.
The last is the target of War Crimes, Slater’s most overtly political song. With artwork by Gazan artist Ahmed Al Da’alsa, the song is an unambiguous takedown of the government’s support for the Gaza genocide. Slater addresses Starmer with some of the bluntest lyrics ever aimed at a British politician:
It’s painted on your fingers
with every hand you shake,
you spread the blood of someone’s daughter
Slater has complained of ‘older people’ criticising her understanding of politics. As the captions in a reel promoting the song state: ‘If you can’t have millennial optimism, you get Gen Z cynicism.’ Responses to Gaza provide yet more evidence of a generational gulf. A courageous number of retirees have led banned Palestine Action protests but across the country, it is the young who are far more likely to express radical positions on Israel-Palestine.
Hashtag socialism
Social media has played a significant part in this generational divide. In reels promoting the song on TikTok and Instagram, captions state: ‘The UK government is complicit in genocide’ and ‘I’ll never say I’m proud to be British’. These seem designed to hijack algorithms and channel polarised attention. Amidst those calling her an ‘icon’, the top-rated comment on one reel accuses Slater of being ‘everything wrong with our once great country’.
Indie artists’ exploitation of social media is nothing new. It is two decades since the Arctic Monkeys were hailed as the first MySpace band after circulating their music online for free. Today, such a strategy seems nostalgic. In the TikTok age, young artists are forced to compete, not with CD sales, but with millions of others offering their works for free in a market that has begun to be diluted by artificial content.
In a market swamped by banal, identikit material, songs combining generational anger with Slater’s knack for viral marketing cut through. In posting reels of songs responding to ICE’s killing of Renée Good among chopping videos and tongue in-cheek messages to future employers, Slater has found a way to play the marketing games of the viral era while ensuring her political songs find their audience.
Just as the 18-34 year olds who voted Thatcher have grown into the 60- and 70-somethings voting Tory or Reform, the young Britons who today flock to Polanski’s Greens are unlikely to shift their allegiances if they are condemned to spend their lives in poor quality rentals, with no prospect of ever retiring, consuming news which bypasses the biases of legacy media.
This is why it is so easy to see Chloe Slater following in the footsteps of Alex Turner or Sam Fender: songwriters who become synonymous with their generation. Hers are songs that articulate the anger, precarity, and jaded politicisation of a hyper–aware new age.
