Slayyyter's 'Worst Girl in America' Marks a Breakthrough After Years on the Fringe
For the past several months, nothing has provided a more potent antidote to the brutal New York winter than Crank, a fiendishly chaotic track by electropop artist Slayyyter. The song is a deliriously overstimulating barrage of record-scratches, squelches, and a chorus that barrels forward with the intensity of a plane crash. In an era of global catastrophe, this sonic chaos has felt strangely soothing to many listeners.
From Midwest Trash to Pop Gold
Slayyyter's new album, Worst Girl in America, scratches a similar anarchic itch. Immediate, vertiginous, and diabolically cheeky, this after-hours record channels a ferality that feels rare in today's homogenised pop landscape. Tracks like the rock-tinged Cannibalism have generated breathless hype among those in the know. All five singles released from the project to date possess the jet propulsion of an artist fueled by years of pop star study and frustration.
"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," Slayyyter admits. The 29-year-old artist, born Catherine Grace Garner, has spent nearly a decade lingering on the clubby outskirts of pop, making brashly sexual, sharp-elbowed music for a chronically online, largely queer fanbase.
A Decade of Chasing Hits
Since breaking out with glitchy, Y2K-coded tracks in the late 2010s, Slayyyter has endured several cycles of chasing hits and thinking "maybe this time it's gonna happen, and it doesn't." On the verge of quitting the music business entirely, she attempted one final Hail Mary: to make the sleazy, propulsive, iPod-era music she has always loved, regardless of its algorithmic or viral potential.
Her aim was simple yet risky: "make something cool – fuck anything that sounds commercial, fuck TikTok." Singles like Beat Up Chanel$, Dance... and Old Technology introduced a sound that is sharper, sleeker, and filthier, tuned to a precise heartland sleaze that's both nostalgic and visionary.
The Rise of Midwest Trash Aesthetic
If in 2024 Chappell Roan popularised the glittery, glam midwest princess, fellow Missouri native Slayyyter offers its dirtier, harder inverse: midwest trash. This hedonistic kaleidoscope encompasses motel parties, unfinished basements, trucker hats, and taxidermy. The new song $t Loser, a play on her hometown of St. Louis, finds her in a sonic car chase, sneering at pretentious critics of her "St Loser misery."
Fans have embraced this direction wholeheartedly. Since the start of the Worst Girl In America era, her monthly streams on Spotify have surged to over 2.3 million. Nevertheless, the self-proclaimed Worst Girl in America is charging toward pop's centre, attempting to escape niche containment.
From Internet Obsessions to Major Label Deal
Out of her midwest trash drag, Slayyyter reveals herself to be midwest nice – chatty, digressive, and eager to discuss the naff noughties cultural references that inform her haute-trash style. These include paparazzi shots of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, Kate Moss's rain-soaked boots at Glastonbury, Perez Hilton, and The Hills.
Growing up in suburban St. Louis, she was "a bit of a loner kid" who found her tribe online, where her interests in celebrity culture and music became "one and the same." Her early music, posted to Soundcloud between shifts as a hair salon receptionist, turned pop culture fixations into vibrantly tacky, bombastic pop.
After a major breakup in Missouri, the artist then known as Slater coped by securing all her social media handles – hence the three Ys. Under this moniker, she released her first track with a beat bought from underground electronic producer Ayesha Erotica. The Bacardi-soaked BFF went moderately viral in 2017 stan Twitter circles while Slayyyter was on shift at the salon.
Navigating Pop's Hollowed-Out Middle Class
Following a move to LA, Slayyyter released her gussied-up 2021 debut Troubled Paradise and the cocaine chic of 2023's Starfucker. She toured with Tove Lo and, more recently, Kesha. Yet approaching 30, navigating pop's hollowed-out middle class began to feel bleak. She had big co-signs but seemed to have hit the ceiling of being "famous but not quite."
"It feels so depressing to say, but I was like, 'Oh, I guess it's over for me,'" Slayyyter confesses. "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."
A Potential Epitaph Turns Breakthrough
Burnout and depression led Slayyyter to create Worst Girl in America 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," she explains. "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 Records, marking her first major label release. The album arrives in a post-Brat landscape where lines between pop music and the club, popular and underground, have blurred significantly.
Artistic Freedom and Future Ambitions
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. When noting that Crank hits like Adderall, she responds, "How do you think that got written?"
Her tourmate Kesha has been an inspiration, particularly in being unapologetically herself. "That inspires me to do the same and to not feel the need to be so buttoned-up all the time," Slayyyter says.
It's difficult to imagine the self-proclaimed Worst Girl in America buttoned-up, especially on an album this riotous, which tears through dive bars, motels, and emotionally desolate gas stations with preposterously heavy beats and bared teeth. The album feels like a breakthrough moment, but Slayyyter has seen enough of the fickle music industry to temper her expectations.
"My biggest thing right now is just continuing to work on music and expand on the sound," she states. "I'm not, like, looking for a mainstream moment. But if one happens, that's great."
