Written by Slayyyter’s music is vile, explicit, and a threat to common decency. Since her early days as a salon receptionist, the artist formerly known as Catherine Garner has channeled her unbridled id with a head-spinning boldness that would be probable cause for exorcism in most God-fearing countries. Over beats as blunt, chromatic, and gleefully stupid as a Jeff Koons sculpture, the singer has vied to make hyperpop more garish and alarming by being hornier, messier, and more extreme than her peers. Together with producer Ayesha Erotica, she dared listeners to join her Bimbo Summit as she barreled through Y2K hedonism without the burdens of taste or conventional morality to slow her down. The mileage one got out of songs like “Daddy AF,” “Throatzillaaa,” or “Purrr” (“Drugs make this kitty go purr”) depended on how willing you were to ride shotgun as she ran the same red lights again and again. Like celebrity gossip, Slayyyter’s unapologetic trashiness could be fabulous in small doses but taxing taken all at once.
Well, guess what? Slayyyter is back and she’s better (and more awful!) than ever. After staring down 30, experiencing a career lull, and contemplating quitting music altogether, the singer staked her future in the industry on the fate of her fourth record. There’s nothing like a kick in the ass: On WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, she comes screaming onto the beat with fresh urgency. Deploying a series of small tweaks that nonetheless feel like a total reinvention, Slayyyter doubles down on misbehavior while simultaneously opening up new lanes of creative potential. As with Charli XCX’s level-up from Crash to BRAT, WOR$T GIRL achieves its bite by chucking pop prettiness out the window and swerving hard into club antagonism. It is because of, rather than despite, its jagged edges that Slayyyter can showcase a vulnerability that’s eluded her previous releases. Chaos doesn’t simply heighten her music’s pathos but underlines her humanity.
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WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is presented as a homecoming twice over: a return to the singer’s Missouri roots and to the music she blasted on her first iPod. You could uncharitably write her off as a trendchaser, joining the scores of artists moving with the nostalgia cycle to capture the grain and texture of late-aughts music as “Y2K” and “indie sleaze” get staler by the day. But that really undersells how well Slayyyter’s production suits her. If previous records massaged her hedonism into silky, professional-grade pop, the sound on WOR$T GIRL is all sinew and scrap metal, a leaner and meaner vehicle for acting out. “Cannibalism!” barrels out the gate with a surf rock bassline that staggers and starts as it’s derailed by peals of blaring guitar. Slayyyter shimmies onto the beat like an amoral John Waters heroine, cruising over the choppy momentum while recounting a toxic love affair in gasping Fred Schneider intonation. At the chorus, she uses her head voice (formerly reserved for Britney imitation) to sound a desperate, one-sided siren song.
More often, Slayyyter is out for blood. WOR$T GIRL makes its home in the deepest red, only ever taking its foot off the gas to dial the volume up even louder. Songs like “Yes Goddd” and “Old Technology” are fistfights of roiling feedback in the spirit of Justice, SebastiAn, and Soulwax. On these tracks Slayyyter uses her voice as a much blunter instrument than before, paring back the melisma and amping up the chants, barks, and outright screams. This can occasionally become tiring, and the back half of the record is littered with tracks that work better as gay WrestleMania intros than as actual songs. But when she’s firing on all cylinders, Slayyyter is absolutely ferocious. “CRANK,” a strong candidate for her most depraved single to date, throttles into a fugue of horny, drug-induced psychosis that’s littered with jaw-droppers like “he wanna fuck Slayyyter/Richard we should link later.” Matching the gnarliness of the beat as it becomes ever more caustic, she gives a performance Death Grips would salute, even if she hadn’t gone the extra mile and actually sampled Carrie Bradshaw like Venus Williams.
WOR$T GIRL is most successful as an argument for Slayyyter’s abrasive style, but the record also contains some of her most painfully and finely rendered human emotion to date. Even in the midst of chaos, Slayyyter can turn out a gorgeous melody. “Unknown Loverz” is by far the prettiest song on the record, riding a euphoria that’s so winsome and uplifting it could only be false: Over a sprinting, moon-eyed beat, the singer pines for the affection of a partner who takes but offers nothing in return. On the mournful “Gas Station,” which Slayyyter has said is about being left behind at a rest stop by her father, the singer replays the blows of a dysfunctional relationship and lets the ache of abandonment echo with 8-bit Crystal Castles synths. The record culminates with the gut punch of “Brittany Murphy.,” a deceptively sunny dark night of the soul that should be more than enough to correct the impression of Slayyyter being a one-dimensional party girl.
Slayyyter is the beneficiary of a shifting tide that’s given mainstream pop a gradual and intermittent willingness to meet unique artists on their own terms, provided they have something exciting to offer. In a phenomenon that’s now clearly downstream from BRAT, singers who’d been written off or long overlooked are now hotter than ever. The Khia asylum was revealed to have been a prison of the audience’s imaginations. On the cusp of quitting outright, Slayyyter’s contrarian impulse has proven to be the correct one. In its full realization, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA more than merits the singer the same consideration as Addison Rae, Zara Larsson, and PinkPantheress. Slayyyter’s worst is still yet to come.
