Slayyyter has always been a star

Stealing liquor bottles from Targets and drinking in parking lots. Sitting on the swings and smoking weed at playgrounds. Shooting empty glass bottles with a rifle during bleak winters with no leaves on the trees. This is Slayyyter’s take on the Midwest: “trashy swag” coupled with rawness and mundanity. “It’s, like, the only shit to do in Missouri,” she jokes. “Cigarettes, baseball bats, guns. That’s all we got.”

For Slayyyter, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA marks a return to her Missouri roots. The 29-year-old St. Louis native mined her teenagerdom to craft her new album, drawing from memories of hanging out with friends and getting up to no good, shuffling between Chief Keef, Lana Del Rey, and Justice on her iPod, surfing the internet, and moodboarding on Tumblr. The end result is a work unlike anything the pop artist has produced before: a grimy, glitzy landscape of Midwest electronica trash-pop. Turn one way and it’s mean and filthy as a nasty bar brawl; turn another way and it’s giddy and anarchic as a night out with your hometown bestie, trespassing abandoned industrial lots and getting shit-faced; turn once more and it’s as chaotic and real as a gas station crash-out, fighting back tears while you hide in a grimy bathroom. 

It’s a dramatic pivot for the artist born Catherine Grace Garner, who got her start making blinged-out Y2K bimbo pop. She’d dropped out of college and was working as a receptionist at a hair salon in St. Louis, spending her free time trawling SoundCloud for beats and experimenting with her own music. In 2017, she broke out with her sleazy Stars Behaving Badly-esque ode to friendship, “BFF,” produced alongside enigmatic hyperpop phenom and frequent collaborator Ayesha Erotica. Subsequent output—including the slutty single “Daddy AF,” which would go on to be featured in films like Bodies Bodies Bodies and Anora, and her viral Britney Spears “Gimme More” remix (“Oh me, oh my, I’m the skinniest bitch alive”)—made her go triple-platinum in the households of chronically online Twitter stan gays. In 2019, she released her self-titled mixtape and nabbed an indie record deal plus a spot on tour with Charli XCX. A move to Los Angeles soon followed, where Slayyyter produced her 2021 debut Troubled Paradise and 2023’s STARFUCKER, a glossy pop autopsy of doomed Hollywood artifice. 

But perhaps this transformation was only possible because Slayyyter was convinced it would be her last. When STARFUCKER didn’t achieve the type of commercial success she’d hoped for, Slayyyter confesses to feeling suicidal, questioning whether she even had a future in the music industry. After being labeled an up-and-coming pop star for years and pouring money down the drain just to keep tours and merch afloat, Slayyyter simply felt “small and stupid” in the music industry, trapped in the purgatory of pop’s middle class. “Everything felt like a humiliation ritual,” she says. She was approaching 30, unsure of how much longer she could continue. “I just was so over it all. I was like, you know what, I’m gonna make one more project, and then maybe I can go back to school. Like, clearly this isn’t working out for me.”

If Slayyyter had to go out, though, she was going to go out with a bang. She was going to get loud—sweaty basement rager, break-your-subwoofers loud. She’d never made a proper loud album before, though she’d always flirted with the sound: at concerts, she’d go ballistic while performing “Daddy AF,” screaming and dropping to her knees and writhing on the ground as her DJ mixed the horny hoe-pop anthem with SebastiAn’s gritty, panicky “Dog”. “I’d treat it like it was this heavy metal song,” says Slayyyter. “And I was always chasing that, like, ‘I want to make music that feels like how we performed that song.’” 

This time, too, Slayyyter didn’t invite any songwriters—WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is just her, talking her shit, penning dumb one-liners without overthinking it. She mentions “CRANK” as her favorite track to make, and the tweak-out thumper indeed feels emblematic of her freewheeling songwriting process: produced in a flash (just 30 minutes!), littered with obnoxious, irreverent rallying cries (“I get so gay off that tequila!”) meant for clambering up telephone poles or trashing motel rooms. “I was giggling to myself in the corner with all these one-liners. Like, aaah, Richard Linklater, you want to fuck Slayyyter,” she laughs. “I felt like Alyssa Edwards on Drag Race.”

All of Slayyyter’s pent-up rage and angst and hunger poured into the studio, producing propulsive banger after banger. You can hear her no-fucks-left-to-give rage in the chest-thumping bravado of “BEAT UP CHANEL$”—“I want sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed”—that sounds, and I say this in the best way, as if it’s been recorded through a trash can. Or in the bratty, helium-pitched vocals of “OLD TECHNOLOGY,” as simultaneously cartoonish and gritty as a white trash Tweety Bird tattoo flexed on a freckled bicep. Or the curdling, flesh-eating yelps of “I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS,” where Slayyyter sounds like she’s trying to tear her own face off. Here is the pop singer’s philosophy of throwing caution and TikTok trends and chart-chasing to the wind, choosing instead to make something that speaks to her own idiosyncratic obsessions. Slayyyter is in her element, breaking shit and having fun. “I love loud and annoying sounds,” she says. “Things where normal people would be like, ‘Turn that off!’ I want to hurt people’s ears.”

Beneath the crash-your-car and stick-up-a-liquor-store dopamine rush of Midwest rage trash-pop, though, lies real honesty and vulnerability. Slayyyter’s more painful dispatches can sound like cigarette-crunched confessions from the payphone booth, her voice crackling with either static or tears; or perhaps a breakdown at the bar, one too many beers before she starts spilling her guts to biker jacket-clad strangers. “GAS STATION” and “UNKNOWN LOVERZ” are unsparing on the hurts of past relationships, chronicling toxic arguments (“We were screamin’ in the car, maybe I should just jump out”), insecurity, and abandonment. And album closer “BRITTANY MURPHY.”—inspired by the late Clueless actress—is a raw look at suicidal ideation, finding Slayyyter anxious about her own failures even after death (“Is my face too disgusting for open casket?”). If bucking commercial appeal and virality allowed her to produce some of her most gleefully grimy and hedonistic tracks, it also, in turn, gave her the space to get darker, heavier, and realer with her songwriting. 

Part of what makes WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA so special, too, is how exacting Slayyyter’s vision is throughout. Sure, you can see the Justice fingerprints all over the album, but these songs never come across as a pastiche of that 2010’s iPod music era; it truly feels like hearing Slayyyter create her own sound. She credits this freshness to the sheer expansiveness of her range of influences, even beyond the obvious electropop touchstones. “A lot of these songs, there’s so many different moving parts in them,” she says. “It could be U2 mixed with Justice, it could have a bit of Ween vocals, it could have, like, Jack White vocals.” For Slayyyter, drawing from such a massive, eclectic well of influences meant they’d inevitably fuse and bastardize into something totally new.

And besides, some of Slayyyter’s deepest inspirations for the project emerged from the visual realm. She gushes about blog nostalgia, David Lynch’s Inland Empire, and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; each of these influences revealed different methods for drawing on and remixing Americana iconography. When Slayyyter signed on with RECORDS/Columbia after completing most of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, she finally got the license to make the big-budget visuals she’d always dreamed of for her music. Most of the album’s visual motifs are culled straight from her life. 

The iconic Donnie Darko-esque bunny, for example, harkens back to Slayyyter’s childhood home; her mom loved bunnies and filled the space with them. “There were always picture frames of bunnies or bunny statues or bunny hand towels,” she says. “It’s a little insane, my house. There were bunnies everywhere.” Likewise, the bedazzled fish of the “CRANK” video was a callback to Slayyyter’s childhood memories of fishing with her grandpa. All the same, she didn’t want to be totally literal with her visuals. While she meant to “paint a visual portrait of the Midwest,” she also wanted it to come out smudged and foggy—a twinge nightmarish, like childhood memories distorted through a funhouse mirror of drugs, dreams, and delirium. “A lot of these visuals kind of feel like you’re like having a bad dream and not really remembering everything correctly,” she says. “Like maybe you grew up in a house with bunnies, but it manifests into this scary bunny man.”

The reception so far to WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA has been incredible to witness: sold-out tour dates, a Coachella debut later this year, shout-outs from the likes of Courtney Love and PinkPantheress, and buzz pouring in from fans—both new and old—proclaiming that mother has returned. For Slayyyter, it’s an affirmation that following her gut was the right choice. Working on the album allowed her to rediscover her passion for music, and ultimately she was proud to have created something that felt 100% her. “I didn’t even know if anyone was gonna really like any of this, so it just feels very comforting that people have been really drawn to it because it feels so authentic to my life and my life story and to me,” she says. “Like, I’m not really playing a character and I’m not being someone else. It really is just me, jumping around in mud boots.”

WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is out now on RECORDS/Columbia.

Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.

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