Slayyyter's 'Worst Girl in America' Album Marks a Major Breakthrough After Nine-Year Journey
For the past several months, the electropop artist Slayyyter has provided a much-needed antidote to the brutal New York winter with her track Crank. This deliriously overstimulating song features record-scratches, squelches, and a chorus that barrels forward with the intensity of a plane crash. In times of global catastrophe, many listeners have found this chaotic energy surprisingly soothing.
From Midwest Roots to Pop Stardom
Slayyyter's new album, Worst Girl in America, continues this anarchic tradition. Immediate, vertiginous, and diabolically cheeky, the after-hours record channels a ferality that feels rare in today's pop landscape. All five singles released from the project so far possess the jet propulsion of someone fueled by years of pop star study and frustrated by what she bluntly calls "my ninth year on the up-and-coming list."
The 29-year-old artist, born Catherine Grace Garner, has spent years lingering on the clubby outskirts of pop, creating 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 experienced multiple cycles of chasing hits that never materialized.
A Last-Ditch Effort That Paid Off
On the verge of quitting the music business, Slayyyter attempted one final Hail Mary: to make the sleazy, propulsive, iPod-era music she has always loved, regardless of algorithmic appeal or viral potential. Her aim was simple but 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. If Chappell Roan popularized the glittery, glam Midwest princess in 2024, fellow Missouri native Slayyyter offers its dirtier, harder inverse: Midwest trash, a hedonistic kaleidoscope of motel parties, unfinished basements, trucker hats, and taxidermy.
Unexpected Success and Industry Navigation
The new song $t Loser, a play on her hometown, finds her in a sonic car chase, sneering at a man "so pretentious, looking down at my St Loser misery." Fans have responded enthusiastically. Since the start of the Worst Girl in America era, her monthly streams on Spotify have surged to over 2.3 million.
"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 admits. Nevertheless, the self-proclaimed Worst Girl in America is charging for pop's center, attempting to escape niche containment.
Cultural Influences and Personal Journey
Out of her Midwest trash drag, Slayyyter reveals herself as Midwest nice – chatty, digressive, and eager to discuss the many naff noughties cultural references that inform her album's haute-trash style. These range from paparazzi shots of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton to Kate Moss's rain-soaked boots at Glastonbury and Perez Hilton's celebrity gossip.
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, deep-fried pop.
From Viral Moments to Major Label Recognition
After her first major breakup in Missouri, the artist then known as Slater coped by securing her social media handles – hence the three Ys. Under this name, 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.
"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," she recalls.
At the time, "hyperpop" was not yet an overused genre term, and Y2K was not 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."
The Struggle with Pop's Middle Class
Still living with her mother in St. Louis, Slayyyter cobbled together attention-grabbing tracks into a mixtape and indie record deal, then secured a spot on Charli XCX's self-titled tour in 2019. A move to LA followed for full albums: her gussied-up 2021 debut Troubled Paradise and the cocaine chic of 2023's Starfucker, an intoxicating exploration of Hollywood's destructive and defiantly plastic allures.
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 described 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.'"
A Creative Rebirth and New Direction
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 reflects. She found herself lost in the shifting sands of taste, questioning what even constitutes a pop hit in today's algorithmically dominated music landscape.
Burned out and 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," she explains. "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 Records, marking her first major label release.
Influences and Future Aspirations
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 asked about Crank hitting like Adderall, she responds with laughter: "How do you think that got written?"
Kesha, the party-girl trailblazer Slayyyter recently supported on her Tits Out Tour, has been a vocal critic of the music industry's most predatory practices. While Slayyyter has luckily avoided the worst, 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's 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. The album feels like a breakthrough moment, but Slayyyter 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."
