Slayyyter
SLAYYYTER has been the tanning booth bimbo, with fake Y2K tits and fizzy turn-of-the-millennium choruses. She’s been mistaken as the hyperpop provocateur, wrongly lumped in with fleeting internet trends. She’s been the ‘80s Hollywood femme fatale, as filtered through the synth gauze of Kavinsky and the alternate reality of Drive. And after everything else, SLAYYYTER decided to become who she was all along, underneath it all: the WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA.
Leading up to her third album, SLAYYYTER was sick of the music industry, and of herself — or, at least, people’s ideas of her. A crisis of faith was purged in Miami, during a stint split between the studio and nightclubs. Once she returned home to Los Angeles in March 2024, SLAYYYTER began concocting her next chapter in earnest: one more authentically her, equal parts defiant and introspective. She began thinking about her St. Louis roots, which in turn made her revisit the formative sounds of her teen years. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is both revelation and evolution, an end destination SLAYYYTER could only reach by going full circle.
“This music was made from a very pure place, chasing songs I wanted to listen to over and over after the studio,” SLAYYYTER explains. “By approaching it that way, I rediscovered how much I love making music. The prompt wasn’t thinking about hits, or algorithm music. I began asking myself: If I died tomorrow and had one last thing to contribute, what would it sound like?”
In the beginning, SLAYYYTER was a creature of the internet. Her self-titled 2019 mixtape popped off online, partially fueled by tracks like “Mine” and “Daddy AF,” and partially by her convincing resurrection of ‘00s pop. Her official debut, 2021’s Troubled Paradise, mostly followed suit, continuing to mine those early influences while experimenting with more contemporary sounds. Internet fervor kicked up a whirlwind in her career, whisking her away from life as a hair stylist in her hometown and plopping her in LA as a new decade of pop music dawned. Yet full mainstream notoriety evaded her. On 2023’s STARFUCKER, she decided to play the game, glamming herself up as a blonde starlet and recording tracks surely destined to be crossover hits.
“I’m not the supermodel poster girl. I feel like it fell flat,” SLAYYYTER admits now. “I don’t walk or talk like that.”
After six years spent in constant, purgatorial “up-and-comer” status, SLAYYYTER grew jaded with the industry and questioned what all these different identities had served. Had they taken her further, or simply further from herself? Before this beginning, there were other ones, origins SLAYYYTER had to go back and excavate to reimagine who she was as an artist once more. All the shape-shifting ultimately led her back home.
As she neared the end of her twenties, SLAYYYTER began thinking about DNA. Who she really wanted to be as an artist, who she was a person, and the upbringing that had formed both. Her childhood was part Shameless (see: chaotic, hard-living family members), part Gossip Girl (see: years spent as the broke girl at the rich kids’ school). Eventually she switched to public school, where she had a great music program and found kids more like her. She fell in with a crew of skaters who behaved like they were on Jackass and bestowed her with what would eventually become her new album title.
“It’s a double entendre,” SLAYYYTER says of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA. “It’s a term of endearment and an insult at the same time.”
Having lost none of her knack for 360 creative direction, SLAYYYTER dreamt up a new visual language for her project: Midwest-core tweaker bar rat. As if throwing acid across the face of STARFUCKER to burn away its glittery, noirish glamor, SLAYYYTER reemerged with an aesthetic using all the colors of her old St. Louis life: seedy, trashy, swaggering, raw.
Accordingly, she returned to the music of her youth, a catch-all style she termed “iPod music.” Unlike past SLAYYYTER outings, this wasn’t a genre exercise but a spiritual callback. “It evokes nostalgia in a way that still feels like something new,” she reflects. She looks back to an era when sounds and styles collided more chaotically, free from algorithms, social media curation, or internet buzz words. Across the album, feral punk, corroded pop, and raunchy rap seamlessly blend. It’s a proper portrait of SLAYYYTER the artist and SLAYYYTER the person alike, with every sound that made her crashing together into a unified whole for the first time in her career.
WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA opens with a patient, tension-building curtain rise. “DANCE…” was one of the early tracks SLAYYYTER finished for the album, and lived as a reference point for the rest of the album. From its slowly intensifying dancefloor pulse, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA goes for the throat. “BEAT UP CHANEL$” establishes the sonic and thematic scope of the album: aggressive verses, an emotive turn in the chorus, a poor kid partying in suburban motels after hours while dreaming of her own twisted version of success. Other early singles carried that energy forward, with the snarling punk of “CANNIBALISM!” or the caustic rap of “CRANK” showing all the sides the worst girl in America has to offer. SLAYYYTER even makes room for some of her most vulnerable songs, like the lovelorn synth-pop of “GAS STATION” and “UNKNOWN LOVERZ.”
On first glance, some of it might not sound all that different from the SLAYYYTERS of the past, but every brash middle finger has a new layer of nuance this time around. SLAYYYTER reflected on the insecurities of her youth and how they metastasized in her career, from a high school loser to a music industry outsider, forever beset by anxiety that she doesn’t fit in or that people don’t get what she’s trying to do. “The whole album is the sound of the comedown anxiety after a night out drinking and doing drugs, where you think everyone hates you,” she says. In the beginning, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA counters this by lashing out with a righteous angst. But as the album progresses, SLAYYYTER reckons with the past and present, arriving at her most human and honest conclusion yet.
“As you get to the end of the album, you are more alone,” SLAYYYTER explains. “It’s wondering: Maybe I don’t hate everyone else, maybe I hate myself. It gets to the why of being so angry at everything and everyone, to the bottom of why people are the way they are.”
WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA concludes with a one-two that peels everything back. With the interlude of “Prayer” and the climactic finale of “Brittany Murphy,” SLAYYYTER lets defeat and depression and hope and humor mingle freely. A suicide note and funeral instructions hidden in an ebullient, robotic pop song, “Brittany Murphy” ends up being the skeleton key for the album, explaining everything you just heard and how we got here. Yet from the lowest of lows, and after a long journey through all her life’s angst, SLAYYYTER finds a new way to embrace the realities of life and death. In its final moments, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA kills SLAYYYTER so SLAYYYTER can be born for real.
“SLAYYYTER began as an alter-ego but is almost more like a nickname now,” she concludes. “There’s less persona and fantasy. That’s not me. Jean shorts, Budweiser, wearing grills — that is me.”