For the past several months, nothing has gotten me through this brutal New York winter quite like Crank, a fiendishly chaotic concoction by the electropop artist Slayyyter. The track is deliriously overstimulating; the singer tweaks out over record-scratches and squelches and ferociously barrels through a chorus that sounds – and I mean this as a sincere compliment – like a plane crash. In these times of global catastrophe, I have found this soothing.
Slayyyter’s new album Worst Girl in America scratches a similar anarchic itch. Immediate, vertiginous and diabolically cheeky, the after-hours record finds her channelling a ferality that feels rare in our slop-ified pop culture (cue the rock-tinged Cannibalism), and has garnered breathless hype among those in the know. All five singles released from the project to date have the jet propulsion of someone fueled on years of pop star study and frustrated by, as she bluntly puts it, “my ninth year on the up-and-coming list”.
In that time, the 29-year old artist born Catherine Grace Garner has lingered on the clubby outskirts of pop, making brashly sexual, sharp-elbowed music for a chronically online, largely queer fanbase. Since breaking out with glitchy, Y2K-coded tracks in the late 2010s, she had done several cycles of chasing hits and thinking “maybe this time it’s gonna happen, and it doesn’t”, she tells me in late March. On the verge of quitting the business, she tried one last Hail Mary – to finally make the sleazy, propulsive, iPod-era music that she says she has always loved, whether or not it worked for an algorithm or viral bites. Her aim was simple but risky: to “make something cool – fuck anything that sounds commercial, fuck TikTok”.
Singles like Beat Up Chanel$, Dance … and Old Technology have introduced a sound that is sharper, sleeker, filthier, with a vibe tuned to a precise heartland sleaze that’s at once nostalgic and visionary. If in 2024 Chappell Roan popularized the idea of the glittery, glam midwest princess, fellow Missouri native Slayyyter offers its dirtier, harder (though no less camp) inverse: midwest trash, a hedonistic kaleidoscope of motel parties, unfinished basements, trucker hats and taxidermy. New song $t Loser, a play on her home town, finds her in a sonic car chase, sneering at a man “so pretentious, looking down at my St Loser misery”. Fans love it. Since the start of the Worst Girl In America era, her monthly streams on Spotify have surged to over 2.3m. “It’s been a mind-fuck to see people respond to this music so much, just because I didn’t think that anyone would really be into it,” she tells me. Nevertheless, the Worst Girl in America is charging for pop’s center, attempting to escape niche containment.
Out of her midwest trash drag, Slayyyter is also midwest nice – chatty, digressive, eager to discuss any of the many naff noughties cultural references that inform Worst Girl in America’s haute-trash style, from paparazzi shots of Lindsay and Paris to Kate Moss’s rain-soaked boots at Glastonbury (as an homage, the album’s vinyl appears stained by dirt), and Perez Hilton to The Hills. We’re breezily FaceTiming from what appears to be her bed in Los Angeles, recalling mutual teenage obsessions from a time when celebrities “seemed both glamorous and totally out of control”, partying and battling TMZ in a way “that felt like a completely foreign world to my suburban midwest upbringing”. Like much of her fanbase, Slayyyter is highly pop-culture literate, shaped by years on Twitter (irony) and Tumblr (evocative pastiche). Growing up in suburban St Louis, she was “a bit of a loner kid” who found her tribe online, and whose interests in celebrity culture and music were “one and the same”.
Her early music, posted to Soundcloud in between shifts as a receptionist at a hair salon – “they wouldn’t let me touch the hair, only the phone” – turned popculturediedin2009 fixations into vibrantly tacky, bombastic, deep-fried pop. “It was very much a parody on that kind of paparazzi, McBling, tabloid, trashy girl,” she recalls – webcam photos with Paris’s mugshot in the background, knowingly ridiculous yet catchy songs about Juicy Couture and rhinestone jeans. After her first major breakup with a boyfriend in Missouri, the artist then known as Slater coped by trying to get all her social media handles in order – hence the three Ys, under which she released her first track with a beat bought from the underground electronic producer and fellow very online teen Ayesha Erotica. The Bacardi-soaked BFF went moderately viral in the right circles for 2017 – stan Twitter, largely – while Slayyyter was on shift at the salon. “I remember sitting at my desk at my job and a magazine put it on their songs of the moment list, and I was like: what is going on? It was so fast.”
At the time, “hyperpop” was not an overused genre term for any self-referential, boundary-pushing electronic music outside the mainstream, and Y2K was not yet an all-encompassing aesthetic. “I feel annoying saying this, but at the time when Ayesha and I were making music, no one was doing that yet, it wasn’t a trend yet,” she says. “Now you type Y2K into your search bar and it’s like every fast-fashion brand has a section on their site.” McBling had legs, and the stan internet-to-experimental-pop-darling pipeline flowed. Still living with her mom in St Louis, Slayyyter cobbled together attention-grabbing tracks into a mixtape and indie record deal, then a spot on Charli xcx’s self-titled tour in 2019. There was a move to LA to make full albums: her gussied-up 2021 debut Troubled Paradise and the cocaine chic of 2023’s Starfucker, an intoxicating and deeply underrated exploration of Hollywood’s destructive and defiantly plastic allures. There were tours with Tove Lo and, more recently, Kesha. There were unexpected wins: Daddy AF, a dementedly horny and catchy riff on the slut persona, which in 2024 became one of the least likely songs to be included in an Oscar-winning movie when it soundtracked strip club scenes in Sean Baker’s film Anora.
But approaching 30, navigating pop’s hollowed-out middle class started to feel bleak. She had big co-signs but seemed to have hit the ceiling of being “famous but not quite”, as Charli xcx put it on her career-realigning 2024 album Brat.
“It feels so depressing to say, but I was like, ‘Oh, I guess it’s over for me,’” Slayyyter says candidly. “[I] started from a place of me wanting to do this for fun with the hopes that maybe I’ll be a star. And then when it kind of happens but not all the way, the goalposts shift. You’re like, ‘Well, my numbers aren’t good enough. Everyone’s getting TikTok hits, and I don’t have that.’
“You start wanting to make decisions based on what you think is going to be popular, which is a really bad place to make any kind of art or creative decision.” With Starfucker, “I thought it had songs that sounded like a hit. And people were telling me, these songs sound like hits. But no one really knows what that is.” She found herself lost in the shifting sands of taste: in the algorithmically dominated and overly niche-ified music landscape, what even is a pop hit?
She was burned out and, as she describes it, depressed. Worst Girl in America was created as a potential epitaph. “I told myself, you know what, I’ll make music for fun after this, but I’ll make one last album and really give it my all, do the album rollout thing, maybe I’ll do a tour if I can afford it,” she says. “I’m sick of losing so much money on so much shit, I’m sick of all this stuff. I’m just gonna go in the studio, make something that if I died after it comes out, I would be proud of it.” The result attracted Columbia, for her first major label release.
The album arrives in a post-Brat landscape, when the lines between pop music and the club, popular and the underground, have seemed to disappear. Slayyyter’s description of making the album – a do-or-die pitch of artistic freedom after a decade in pop’s middle class, beloved in queer circles but largely unknown outside it – reminds me of Charli’s descriptions for the making of Brat. But Slayyyter is reluctant to engage in any comparisons. “I don’t really know her, or I don’t really think my music is in line with anything in that world,” she says, “Back in the day when people would call what I was doing hyperpop, I always felt kind of confused.”
The urgency of Worst Girl In America can be traced to 80s gutterpunk and noughties electro sleaze as well as the whiplash pace of her internet-addled brain. “I have ADHD in a way that is so severe,” she laughs in one of many unfinished digressions. When I note that Crank does in fact hit like Adderall, she laughs – “How do you think that got written?” And, of course, there’s Kesha, the party-girl trailblazer Slayyyter recently supported on her Tits Out Tour. (Like Kesha before her, Worst Girl in America is stylized with a $.) Her tourmate has been a necessarily vocal critic of the music industry’s most predatory practices; Slayyyter has luckily avoided the worst – “I can’t even imagine,” she says – and Kesha has helped her learn through osmosis. “She was unapologetically herself always,” Slayyyter says. “That inspires me to do the same and to not feel the need to be so buttoned-up all the time.”
It is admittedly difficult to imagine the self-proclaimed Worst Girl in America buttoned-up, especially on an album this riotous, which rips through dive bars, motels and emotionally desolate gas stations with preposterously heavy beats and bared teeth. It’s certainly magnetic, and that rare thing for the very online these days: fresh. It feels like a breakthrough moment, but Slayyter has seen enough of the fickle music industry to not allow herself to believe that yet. “My biggest thing right now is just continuing to work on music and expand on the sound,” she says. “I’m not, like, looking for a mainstream moment. But if one happens, that’s great.”
