To Be Eaten Alive

Apple Music features an animated artwork for this release.

I’m a Scorpio, so I compare myself to a scorpion. A scorpion, at first glance, it’s more meek. It’s in the cut, hiding away or something. You don’t really know what it’s capable of. There are a lot of animals that might have a bright color or something that will be identifiable or a smell that will make you not want to fuck with it. Scorpions don’t really have that, so you don’t know what you’re gonna get… and then you take another animal such as a lion, right? A lion can eat whatever it wants to eat. It is the king of the jungle. It is top of the food chain. It is great, powerful, big, noble. So the metaphor I came up with was that because it can be poisonous and venomous; if you were to eat it, it would kill you. So to be eaten alive is really to kill.

— Mariah the Scientist via Complex

I don’t wanna say that there was like one sound that inspired the entire project. But there are some songs on there that are really old. The intro is a song that I produced in quarantine. It was just somber and I didn’t know what to do. There was a restless energy then. So I ordered some equipment. I guess I thought I was gonna produce some stuff, which I did, but I only produced two songs or two instrumentals. One of them I built on to it and used it as the intro. I felt like it was a different sound. It was just interesting because it just came straight from out of my brain. That’s why I kinda like the idea of production, because it could just be anything. It’s like you could start with something simple. You can give one simple loop or instrumental to multiple different producers to put drums on, and it’s gonna come back in 500 different ways. I really like that aspect of it. I’ve always been really hands on with everything. That first song took the longest to produce. It’s probably years old now. But yeah, some shit is older than that, maybe like four years old on there. And then some stuff is as new as within the last few months, three months. So, there was no real inspiration for the sound. What I will say is I wasn’t looking for it to be too R&B-ish because I don’t wanna be stuck in this one category. That’s not really how I feel in every single song. I don’t feel so rhythm and blues; I feel alternative. I feel different ways.

— Mariah the Scientist, via Complex

• Spanish Translation.

To Be Eaten Alive debuted and peaked at #93 on the Billboard 200 for the chart week ending November 11, 2023.