The lyrics in the song “No Mas” off Slater’s sixth and newest album, “ESI II” brings the listener to a cruise down the Interstate 5, soda in the cup holder, sun beating down on the convertible. Slater’s style has stayed true to the sunny aesthetics associated with SoCal living, with every track crossing over the lines of rap, pop, and alternative rock, as have his previous works.
But ESI II relies on more than just West Coast vibes—it is a living, breathing testament to the SoCal culture that he grew up with.
Nichlaus Beaty’s early music-making days date back to his childhood in Santa Ana, California, when he played in a band with brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears—who went on to form the experimental rock band The Garden—whom he met on a baseball team in middle school. The three of them played punk music together throughout middle and high school, until the time the Shears brothers started to establish their band, while they helped Beaty record his first solo songs while he was in college in San Francisco (during which time he chose his musical name “Slater”). Beaty described his college music production experience as intense, but ultimately left him wanting to focus on his music career and move back to SoCal.
“I grew up doing Mexican traditions around family members who didn’t really speak English, or never would speak English. They would speak Spanglish in the house, and my grandparents didn’t speak English well,” Beaty said. “In SoCal, you got taquerias on the corner, you got the fucking pandillas, like everything. So that’s what I grew up knowing the most.”
But as someone who grew up mixed race, Beaty’s relationship with his Mexican identity was fraught. “I didn’t really get accepted by Mexican people. They would look at me as being half white and not really Mexican. I still get shit from members of my family. People on my maternal side like to make jokes, but I didn’t choose to be mixed race. I was born that way. It’s kind of hard because I have siblings who are half Mexican, too, and they actually look Hispanic. And so they get more accepted in Hispanic places, but I’m just here.”
Beaty used the Slater project as an opportunity to reclaim his identity as a Mexican person. “I’m claiming it for me. Because I know what I am. So I don’t care if these people accept me or not.”
As a result, Beaty has noticed that a lot of his Hispanic fanbase relates heavily to his music and feels inspired by seeing their identities represented in the largely white indie rock music scene.
Beaty’s music has certainly had this impact on many of his fans, as his show at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg proved. The bar was fully packed, red and blue lights flashed from the ceiling, and fans in the front row shrieked in excitement while reaching out to him. As he clutched his microphone tight in one hand, Beaty held a white flag with a black nautical star at the center of it—as seen in his music video for “A Party in Devin’s Room”—in the other, waving it into the crowd of devoted fans desperately grasping onto the edges of the flag.
From his 2022 single “Burnt”, with an ephemeral sound that mirrors the feeling of staring down a mirage glimmering off the I-15, to his 2023 song “Dj’s Up in the Club,” a fan favorite that made the audience go from swaying like palm trees to jumping up and down, Beaty’s music made me forget that I was in the concrete jungle of New York City. And with his newest songs on the 2025 album, which he filled with his signature rap style of cramming as many words as possible into a single bar, it was clear, looking around at the audience and those singing along, who were his dedicated fans.
Despite having a loyal following and growing base, Beaty recently announced in a post on his Twitter account that his ESI II World Tour is going to be his last tour as “Slater,” or his last one for a while. In our conversation, Beaty said that he will continue to make music, but that he needs to take a break from touring to get back into the headspace of making music as his authentic self.
“I’ve had a lot of highs and lows. I don’t think it’s good for people’s mental health to tour,” Beaty said. “Doing music full-time has made it really hard to separate myself personally from ‘Slater’. It’s my art, and my vulnerability is on the table. I want [making music] to be sustainable, and I want it to be something I can do for a long time. So I gotta detach myself from that for a little bit, and I think taking this step back from touring would help me.”