{"id":567620,"date":"2026-03-27T10:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T10:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/567620\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T10:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T10:39:08","slug":"i-didnt-think-anyone-would-be-into-it-slayyyter-turns-midwest-trash-into-pop-gold-pop-and-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/567620\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I didn\u2019t think anyone would be into it\u2019: Slayyyter turns midwest trash into pop gold | Pop and rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past several months, nothing has gotten me through this brutal New York winter quite like Crank<\/a>, a fiendishly chaotic concoction by the electropop artist Slayyyter. The track is deliriously over-stimulating; the singer tweaks out over record-scratches and squelches and ferociously barrels through a chorus that sounds \u2013 and I mean this as a sincere compliment \u2013 like a plane crash. In these times of global catastrophe, I have found this soothing.<\/p>\n

Slayyyter\u2019s 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 slopified pop culture (cue the rock-tinged Cannibalism<\/a>), 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, \u201cmy ninth year on the up-and-coming list\u201d.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmaybe this time it\u2019s gonna happen, and it doesn\u2019t\u201d, she tells me in late March. On the verge of quitting the business, she tried one last hail mary \u2013 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 \u201cmake something cool \u2013 fuck anything that sounds commercial, fuck TikTok\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Singles like Beat Up Chanel$<\/a>, Dance\u2026<\/a> and Old Technology<\/a> have introduced a sound that is sharper, sleeker, filthier, with a vibe tuned to a precise heartland sleaze that\u2019s 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 \u201cso pretentious, looking down at my St Loser misery\u201d. Fans love it. Since the start of the Worst Girl In America era, her monthly streams on Spotify have surged to over 2.3m. \u201cIt\u2019s been a mind-fuck to see people respond to this music so much, just because I didn\u2019t think that anyone would really be into it,\u201d she tells me. Nevertheless, the Worst Girl in America is charging for pop\u2019s center, attempting to escape niche containment.<\/p>\n

Out of her midwest trash drag, Slayyyter is also midwest nice \u2013 chatty, digressive, eager to discuss any of the many naff noughties<\/a> cultural references that inform Worst Girl in America\u2019s haute-trash style, from paparazzi shots of Lindsay and Paris to Kate Moss\u2019s rain-soaked boots at Glastonbury (as an homage, the album\u2019s vinyl appears stained by dirt), and Perez Hilton to The Hills. We\u2019re breezily FaceTiming from what appears to be her bed in Los Angeles, recalling mutual teenage obsessions from a time when celebrities \u201cseemed both glamorous and totally out of control\u201d, partying and battling TMZ in a way \u201cthat felt like a completely foreign world to my suburban midwest upbringing\u201d. 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 \u201ca bit of a loner kid\u201d who found her tribe online, and whose interests in celebrity culture and music were \u201cone and the same\u201d.<\/p>\n

Her early music, posted to Soundcloud in between shifts as a receptionist at a hair salon \u2013 \u201cthey wouldn\u2019t let me touch the hair, only the phone\u201d \u2013 turned popculturediedin2009<\/a> fixations into vibrantly tacky, bombastic, deep-fried pop. \u201cIt was very much a parody on that kind of paparazzi, McBling, tabloid, trashy girl,\u201d she recalls \u2013 webcam photos with Paris\u2019s 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 \u2013 hence the three Ys, under which she released her first track with a beat bought from underground electronic producer and fellow very online teen Ayesha Erotica. The Bacardi-soaked BFF went moderately viral in the right circles for 2017 \u2013 stan Twitter, largely \u2013 while Slayyyter was on shift at the salon. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, \u201chyperpop\u201d 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. \u201cI feel annoying saying this, but at the time when Ayesha and I were making music, no one was doing that yet, it wasn\u2019t a trend yet,\u201d she says. \u201cNow you type Y2K into your search bar and it\u2019s like every fast-fashion brand has a section on their site.\u201d 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<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2019s Starfucker, an intoxicating and deeply underrated exploration of Hollywood\u2019s 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<\/a> in an Oscar-winning movie when it soundtracked strip club scenes in Sean Baker\u2019s film Anora.<\/p>\n

But approaching 30, navigating pop\u2019s hollowed-out middle class<\/a> started to feel bleak. She had big co-signs but seemed to have hit the ceiling of being \u201cfamous but not quite\u201d, as Charli xcx put it on her career-realigning 2024 album Brat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels so depressing to say, but I was like, \u2018Oh, I guess it\u2019s over for me,\u2019\u201d Slayyyter says candidly. \u201c[I] started from a place of me wanting to do this for fun with the hopes that maybe I\u2019ll be a star. And then when it kind of happens but not all the way, the goalposts shift. You\u2019re like, \u2018Well, my numbers aren\u2019t good enough. Everyone\u2019s getting TikTok hits, and I don\u2019t have that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou 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.\u201d With Starfucker, \u201cI 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.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

Photograph: Kait Muro<\/p>\n

She was burned out and, as she describes it, depressed. Worst Girl in America was created as a potential epitaph. \u201cI told myself, you know what, I\u2019ll make music for fun after this, but I\u2019ll make one last album and really give it my all, do the album rollout thing, maybe I\u2019ll do a tour if I can afford it,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m sick of losing so much money on so much shit, I\u2019m sick of all this stuff. I\u2019m just gonna go in the studio, make something that if I died after it comes out, I would be proud of it.\u201d The result attracted Columbia, for her first major label release.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s description of making the album \u2013 a do-or-die pitch of artistic freedom after a decade in pop\u2019s middle class, beloved in queer circles but largely unknown outside it \u2013 reminds me of Charli\u2019s descriptions<\/a> for the making of Brat<\/a>. But Slayyyter is reluctant to engage in any comparisons. \u201cI don\u2019t really know her, or I don\u2019t really think my music is in line with anything in that world,\u201d she says, \u201cBack in the day when people would call what I was doing hyperpop, I always felt kind of confused.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI have ADHD in a way that is so severe,\u201d she laughs in of many unfinished digressions. When I note that Crank does in fact hit like Adderall, she laughs \u2013 \u201cHow do you think that got written?\u201d And, of course, there\u2019s Kesha<\/a>, 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\u2019s most predatory practices; Slayyyter has luckily avoided the worst \u2013 \u201cI can\u2019t even imagine,\u201d she says \u2013 and Kesha has helped her learn through osmosis. \u201cShe was unapologetically herself always,\u201d Slayyyter says. \u201cThat inspires me to do the same and to not feel the need to be so buttoned-up all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. \u201cMy biggest thing right now is just continuing to work on music and expand on the sound,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m not, like, looking for a mainstream moment. But if one happens, that\u2019s great.\u201d<\/p>\n