"WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA" By Slayyyter
by Joshua Diaz
Genre:Electropop/Dancerock
Slayyyter is the unheard voice of a generation that is finally learning how to hear her.
For nearly a decade, Catherine Garner has occupied a weird space in pop music between underground darling, and main pop girl. She has the cult fanbase, the visuals, the obscene lyrics, the personality, and most importantly, the songs. Recognition just seemed to trail a few steps behind her. With WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, everybody’s finally caught up. Right now, there is no such thing as too much Slayyyter. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA has been especially heavy in my rotation because it feels like the album where everything I found interesting about her finally crashes into everything she was apparently never supposed to become. Released March 27, 2026, her third studio album is loud, humorous, and emotionally charged. Unlike the immaculate celebrity cosplay of her sophomore album, STARF*CKER, this time, the polished super-star fantasy slips.
Slayyyter conceived the record partly as a return home. Back to Missouri and back to the music she grew up on with her first iPod, from late-2000s pop to Justice, Crystal Castles, and grimier dance-rock. She had also considered whether this might be her last album at
all. If STARF*CKER, imagined L.A. through paparazzi flashes and designer sunglasses, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA smells like gasoline, cheap perfume, and cigarettes outside of a Midwestern dive bar.
“DANCE…” opens the album by throwing you straight into the deep end. For almost five minutes, synths grind against each other while Slayyyter treats the club less like a glittery sanctuary and more like a place full of people she wants away from her. It’s repetitive on purpose, almost irrationally so, which is what makes this song work so well. The chorus keeps circling back to the same dismissal, “I don’t need you, I don’t need anyone”, until dancing starts to sound less like a celebration and more like something she has to keep doing to make the dismissal believable. The more she says she doesn’t need anyone, the more noticeable it becomes that she feels compelled to keep saying it.
Then, “BEAT UP CHANEL$” makes the room even dirtier. The title alone tells you everything. Damaged luxury, embarrassing glamor, and a Chanel bag that’s sticky from a spilled drink. That tension has always made Slayyyter more interesting to me rather than the surplus of Y2K revivalists she gets grouped up with. She likes beautiful things, but she rarely seems interested in presenting beauty untouched. The Slayyyter celebrity persona has always had a little sweat underneath it. Even when STARF*CKER was at its glossiest, its fascination with fame was inseparable from humiliation. On WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, she stops cleaning up the mess.
“CANNIBALISM!” shows up with guitar, bass, and all the subtlety of somebody kicking a door off its hinges. This is where the record really separates itself from her earlier work. Slayyyter has always been a maximalist, but previously that excess could still be buffed into recognizable pop. Here, the songs sometimes seem actively annoyed by prettiness.
“CANIBALISM!”, jerks around its bassline, “OLD TECHNOLOGY” sounds fried, “YES GODDDD” barely gives the vocals enough room to breath, and “CRANK” is an amalgamation of all the ridiculous things this album has to offer. Her dance and rock influences aren’t tucked politely underneath modern pop production, rather she allows them to sound old, blown out, and hostile.
“CRANK” in particular sounds like she dared herself to see how hostile and sharp she could make a song without stopping it from being fun. Her voice gets swallowed by distortion, reappears, screams, and disappears again in a cycle that lasts for 2 minutes and 55 seconds. Somehow, this abrasive little experiment also became one of the album’s earliest viral breakthroughs, taking off online before the record was even released. It shouldn’t work this well.
And sometimes it doesn’t, because WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is not a flawless album and pretending otherwise would be to misunderstand what makes this record exciting. When nearly every production choice is turned to eleven, eleven starts sounding normal. There are stretches where the shouting, distortion, and pounding percussion stop surprising you and just become the album’s default. “$T. LOSER” is funny and makes complete sense in this world, but by the time it arrives, you’ve already been hit over the head several times by the last 10 basslines.
What saves it from becoming one very expensive headache, is that Slayyyter knows when to give the character a rest. “GAS STATION” sits almost directly in the middle of the record, and feels strangely exposed compared to everything surrounding it. Slayyyter has said the song started out as something about a romantic relationship, but eventually evolved into a reflection on her father and a childhood memory of being left behind at a gas station. Suddenly the trashy Midwestern party girl isn’t just a funny costume, but an added nuance to the Slayyyter celebrity.
“GAS STATION” reframes some of the album’s grit without turning it into an elaborate concept record where every drug reference secretly represents a childhood trauma. Slayyyter is still having fun being filthy. But WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA understands that self destruction and pleasure can sit next to one another without one canceling out the other.
“UNKNOWN LOVERZ” takes this idea somewhere softer. After all the distortion, screaming, and blown out bass, it's almost suspiciously pretty. The production still races forward, but Slayyyter sounds less invincible, chasing affection from somebody who doesn’t seem nearly as invested. It works because the album doesn’t suddenly stop being itself to prove that she has depth. There is no obligatory piano ballad where the party girl puts the cigarettes down and reminds us that she has feelings too. The sadness still has a beat.
That may be one of the smartest things about this record. Slayyyter never uses it to become respectable. She can be vulgar, materialistic, sexual, vain, ridiculous, and still deeply lonely. The album doesn’t try to redeem those qualities or reveal that they were some secret mask the entire time. They are all allowed to exist at once.
“WHAT IS IT LIKE, TO BE LIKED?” makes that loneliness much harder to ignore. The question that almost feels too direct for an artist whose music has spent years hiding insecurity underneath desirability, fame, money, and whatever designer label happened to fit into the rhyme scheme. But beneath all of that excess is something painfully simple, wanting to be wanted. Fame is attention. Money is attention. Fashion is attention. Being the loudest person in the room guarantees that everybody has at least looked at you. But being looked at isn't the same as being liked.
When the album reaches “BRITTANY MURPHY.”, being looked at and being liked have given way to a darker question, what does any of that attention actually leave behind? Slayyyter has called “BRITTANY MURPHY.” the most personal song on the record, one rooted in her own depression and suicidal thoughts rather than Murphy herself. Its opening plea, “Remember me beautiful,” twists the album’s obsession with being seen into something much more unsettling. Suddenly, it isn’t about who is looking at her now, but how she might be remembered when she is gone. After spending so much of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA performing invincibility, Slayyyter closes the record sounding much less certain about what performance actually gets you.
This is what makes WOR$ST GIRL IN AMERICA feel like her most authentic record. Not in the irritating sense that an artist picked up an acoustic guitar and decided to strum the chords of the “real” them. Slayyyter is still playing with character here. She is still exaggerating, performing, and turning herself into something larger and uglier than reality. The difference is that the record never forces those contradictions into something cleaner. She can chase fame and build the Slayyyter celebrity while making fun of the machinery around it. She can make something trashy without needing to convince you that the trash is secretly high art. She can be completely in on it and still mean every word she is saying.
That is what makes WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA work so well. It never asks Slayyyter to be anything less than exactly who she is.
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