TL;DR
- Slayyyter releases her new album ‘Wor$t Girl in America’.
- The album reflects a blend of nostalgic and modern pop sounds.
- She aims to redefine her artistic persona while retaining creative control.
- Fans can expect a vibrant tour with festival appearances.
- Slayyyter embraces her polarizing nature in the music industry.
When you think of Slayyyter, a very specific image and attitude come to mind: a bratty pop diva who sings about getting “gay off that tequila.” You’re probably imagining her with a set of black shades on even while inside, a chestnut brown fur of some sort, and a standoffish, cool-girl attitude. But as her PR rep guided me into a meeting room in a random Brooklyn office building where she and her team set themselves up for a packed day of interviews, the singer was anything but that. The pop star was disarmingly kind and genuinely excited to talk about her new album, Wor$t Girl in America, which was released today.
Sans sunglasses and fur, she seemed to have left the Slayyyter persona at home and arrived for the interview as Catherine Grace Garner — her real name. We met at a random office building in Brooklyn Heights and sat under harsh fluorescent lighting while we talked about her new project. Since releasing her last album Starfucker in 2023, Slayyyter went on a headlining tour of her own in addition to supporting acts like Tove Lo, Fletcher, and Kesha’s joint tour with Scissor Sisters. Even though she was touring with big names, the rising alt-pop star felt a sense of dissatisfaction.
“I felt like Starfucker felt like a bit of a letdown in a way to me,” she tells Them, “because I thought it would do something and it didn’t do as much as I’d hoped.” So she set out to switch up her sound a bit, moving away from dance pop, and aiming to make an album she finds “really sick.” Slayyyter decided to find inspiration online — logging into Tumblr, picking her iPod back up, and reconnecting with the sounds of her high school days. She started putting the pieces of an album puzzle together by referencing the aesthetics of the early 2010s.
Yeezus by Kanye West, Kid Cudi, and M.I.A. were all cited as influences, and it’s hard not to hear them on the album — the braggadocious vocals that stop any listener in their tracks, clamoring electric guitars, and a menagerie of synths that invoke the pop and hip-hop auteurs of the 2010s. In 2025, Slayyyter signed to Columbia Records, the legendary major label boasting signees such as Addison Rae, Adele, Beyoncé, Harry Styles, and Miley Cyrus, to name a few. She announced it the same day she released the lead single for Wor$t Girl in America, “Beat Up Chanels,” a gritty, bass-heavy track that she told Rolling Stone is an ode to “drunk high school nights in parking lots, hanging at the skate park watching the boys, longing for designer items I couldn’t afford, partying in motels in St. Louis when the bars would close, dying my hair purple.”
Her new record label has allowed her to retain as much creative control over her output as she wants, as evidenced by the run of singles she released leading up to the album. After that first song, she put out the more up-tempo, surf rock track, “Cannibalism!” as the second single. But she didn’t stop there — she put out three more singles, each one better than the last: “Crank,” a declaration of her party girl life backed by a propulsive bass and her signature clever lyrics; “Dance…,” a glittery, elevated nod to her dance-pop era; and “Old Technology,” a bouncy ode to the aesthetics that inspired the project.
The singles set the sonic foundation of what fans can expect from Wor$t Girl in America — less about solely relying on the sounds of her teenage years, but rather using them as a springboard to push her own sound further. “I didn’t want to make an album that was so on the nose like ‘This is Tumblr vibes,’ because I feel that gets taken a bit too far lately, where people will say categorize their music as like ‘indie sleaze Tumblr,’ and I hate the term indie sleaze,” she says, while visibly attempting not to crawl out of her skin at the words leaving her mouth.
She says she was inspired by the social media platform and dyed her hair purple because she was obsessed with the soft grunge aesthetic. “I wanted to kind of reimagine that era of music and social media, but in a future-forward way that felt fresh, different, and modernized,” she adds. Slayyyter has always seen herself as “an internet baby” and has always been chronically online from a young age. Her most formative internet memory is playing with Webkinz as a child — the animal plushies that came with codes to bring them to life online. She’d also put together elaborate webcam photoshoots as a child and post them online, which she credits as the moment she realized she loved making imagery for the internet.
The pop musician has carried that passion into building the aesthetic for each of her albums. Most recently, she’s gotten into the director’s chair for the music videos for this most recent run of singles, including co-directing the “Beat Up Chanels” video. “Getting to direct these videos and execute my so precisely has been so creatively fulfilling in ways that I’ve never felt before,” she says. “It’s my vision, fully untapped and uncompromised.”
It’s clear that on this new project that she’s not only pushing herself creatively, but vocally as well. Fans are going to want to be mindful of the volume in their headphones when listening to songs like “Yes Goddd,” “$t. Loser,” and “I’m Actually Kind of Famous,” because not only is she testing the boundaries of her voice, but the production turns the dial up to 100. When she was in the studio making these three songs, she says that she was reaching into her own angst and pulling out what she found. “It all came from a place of naturally what my vocals do when I scream or where I’m inclined to go with melodies or a rap verse, but ‘Yes Goddd’ is definitely a crazy one,” she says.
Slayyyter’s fans are certainly clamoring to hear these songs live, and before the album came out, she released a set of dates for the “Wor$t Girl in the World Tour” with shows starting in Vancouver in September and ending in London on November 5. In addition to her headlining dates, she’s also hitting the festival circuit, slated to perform at Coachella, Governor’s Ball, Lollapalooza, and the Neon Skies Music Festival. Slayyyter is excited to get back on stage, especially with this new material. “In the studio, I feel like the creative choices I make are because I think, ‘Oh, this would be so sick live,’” she says. “I feel like my music lends nicely to a live space and I just always have the thought in my head, ‘This will just blow the speakers out.’”
There is little doubt in my mind that 2026 will be Slayyyter’s year after the world has a chance to hear the album. She has a real shot at becoming a successful mainstream artist with this album, the most successful proof of concept of her creative vision thus far; once people get on board, it’s easy to imagine hers becoming a household name. So, I wondered: Is that something she wanted, and if so, did she have any apprehensions about finding an audience outside the niche she built in specific corners of the internet? “I do think that the bigger you get as an artist, like, the less control you have over your public perception or like narratives around you,” Slayyyter says, which immediately brings the recent Chappell Roan drama to mind. “Something really scary about the internet that I found recently is that people can say something about you and it’s like two truths and a lie, and they can just throw in details that aren’t true, but that’s what gets ran with.” Like every bad bitch before her though, Slayyyter knows that all press is good press. “At the end of the day, I always say, ‘If people hate you, they’ll talk about you 10 times more than if they like you,’” she says. “So it’s good to have a bit of a polarizing nature to your project.”
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