Slayyyter’s latest release, ‘WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA’ is a total sensory overload. There I said it. It’s a white-knuckle fist fight free-for-all that collides Midwest trash with LA glamour and blends iPod music nostalgia, tweaky hyperpop, and raw pop-punk aggression into one fully-realised body of work.
It’s constructed of loud and heartbreaking mixes that dismantle the once untouchable party-girl persona from the inside out. And across this 14-track soundscape, Catherine Grace Garner (not nearly as cool of a name) weaponises dual identities by wiping the gloss of celebrity culture and smearing it with sweat, panic, and existential dread. It’s a wildly mature release that turns indie sleaze into pure adrenaline. Her world building goes crazy.
Just a head’s up, I have a looooot to say about this album so this entry is going to be longer than others. Sorry not sorry! Let’s get gritty.
Dialling up the tones right out of the gate, DANCE… serves as a high-octane introduction to Slayyyter as a first concept for a lot of her audience. Produced by Valley Girl, it plays like a Halloween-esque, TikTok massacre of a track where risers enter… seemingly without an ending. A mismatch of experimental synths give way to a steady drumbeat, paving the way for a main lead synth with a rhythmic pulse so heavy it’s immediately engaging. We wait a full minute and thirteen seconds before hearing the first sign of vocals, distant and declarative as Slayyyter spills, “you couldn’t wait to see me out.” She’s giving in to her party anthem ways already, sounding intoxicatingly rich and juicy right from the get-go.
We get a real sense of her vocal ability already here, delivered in a hushed, lethal tone that builds over side-chained production: “orange wine, fake smile” “I’ll keep it real […] fuck how you feel.” Giving these lyrics with sharp-tooth clarity, she delivers lines like slurs as she spirals down the octaves with a gorgeously vampire-esque quality (“I kinda hate you but it doesn’t matter let me dance”). Throwing it all on the dancefloor, Slayyyter manages her issues by looking for someone to match her freak, declaring, “creatures like you crawl to me every night,” in her (what I’m coining) very own ‘Thriller moment’. Lit up with white spirit being ready to ignite, the bridge (“I’ll end it in the morning when you seem unimportant”) sets up an outro of a lifetime with highly technical riffs and croons before riding off into the night over a juicy, groovy bassline. Insane opener.
Without giving you a single second to breathe, BEAT UP CHANEL$ launches us straight into the super raw, gritty reality of “money, drugs, chains on my chest, that vintage Celine.” It’s a relentless hyperpop track driven by a dirty synth and 808s tuned super low. They really carry. Moving away from the dance motif of the opener, Slayyyter steps into a drug-loaded paradise: (“I want sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed”).
This is like a dirty stadium anthem. I can already hear the crowds screaming along to her unapologetic refrain: “I don’t give a damn, don’t you understand?” The production is really a magnum opus of ‘the rise and fall’ here, with synths acting like blaring sirens warning us of a crash. It’s a massive highlight of her personality, clearly preferring the chaos of a night out over a partner. The bridge encapsulates this panicked BPM so well too, landing the “I need a cigarette” line with absolute perfection. Headphones up.
Drifting smoothly into another fire-fuelled banger, CANNIBALISM! is a personal favourite of mine. It shifts the vibe into a groove-onset nightmare, opening with a shaky breath and an evil laugh. Having moved from partying to rejecting romance, she’s now ready to literally eat her love interest whole. Over a nasti bassline, she drops top-tier one-liners like “stone cold, I take what he’s giving” and “I heard he loves a blonde.”
Giving into pure temptation, the pre-chorus marks Slayyyter’s rockiest, edgiest moment yet, driven by overdriven guitars as she pleads, “oh it’s on, it’s on, I want, I want”, achored by addictive synths that bleed into the chorus as her vocals slide into an almost Arabic-scale. She preaches “tell you I’m needing it […] if I don’t have you I’ll die” over a blood-soaked and forward composition. She declares the dangers awaiting this man if he steps out of line and her baby-pitched register in the verses contrast brilliantly with the rocky and explosive climax. Gem. A special shoutout to the second chorus where the beat drops out completely, leaving airy, unbacked vocals before a massive injection of production crashes back in as she begs, “please God send me a sign.”
Crashing out again, OLD TECHNOLOGY serves as an unapologetic ode to the oldest tech in the game: drugs. Opening with “I never chase the vibe,” this plodding synth turns into a massive vibrato number in the pre-chorus. And as the pace increases, these synth morph into a thick bass line before eventually dissolving into jagged guitar riffs. The stems are literally morphing as she shouts “I need some peace of mind, I’m doing drugs tonight!”.
With 2000s-esque nods to Tumblr and iPods, it captures the internet age with precision, marking the first time ecstasy has been framed explicitly like outdated tech. Lol. It functions as a crucial transitional track on the LP, perfectly capturing (or cranking…) — wait we’re not there yet — that disorienting feeling of coming up.
Okay fair. You’ve been waiting for it. Time to CRANK. This one is the ultimate festival entrance track, because no song on the album possesses more main-character energy than this one. The daring intro sounds like a possessive signal and this record literally is the sonic equivalent of getting an electric shock. Leaning into the crammed, chaotic atmosphere, she delivers absurdly iconic lines: “I stray just like a dog addicted to that heavy fucking.”
But like… what does cranking mean? To ‘crank’ is to… well, you can’t simply explain it you need to experience it. One cannot simply just crank. But basically, it’s an aggressive command to turn the fucking music up.
Building us up with sirens once again, her vocals are doubled with shouty layers over a pulsing drumbeat (“I get straight, I stay bad, I keep my finger on the trigger […] I get so gay off that tequila”). The chorus then devolves into scatty vocals, dubstep influences, and Slayyyter literally repeatedly screaming “CRANK IT” throughout. It’s a sensory overload cut that belongs on an overcrowded festival main stage. You can smell the poppers on this one. It’s an absolute production overload that could make you run a 5k in three minutes. Insane.
Toning it down because we desperately fucking needed it, GAS STATION marks a sudden, emotional shift in direction. Here, Slayyyter confronts the pain of her dad practically disowning her by leaving her at a gas station. The opening vocals are trembling and heartbreaking, saying “I don’t think you ever really liked me” and the synths sound digital, nostalgic, and solitary. It really paints a vivid image of standing on the side of a motorway.
She makes clever use of vibrato to mimic a crying tone (“I was crying out my eyes, oh the desperation”) and it’s a gut-wrenching, crying-in-the-club kinda song where the production stays uptempo despite the heavy lyrics. The staccato synths mimic pumping petrol into a car while 8-bit sounds tick up like a $10-a-litre meter. Condensing her register into a tighter octave range, this minimal track scales back the chaos to let the sheer heartbreak land.
But just as we settle into that slower pace, YES GODDD explodes into full screamo, leaning hard into the album’s pop-punk aesthetic. The pre-chorus is side-chained to the max, stripping away her tonality as she sneers, “poor thing, there’s no excuses, do you think I’m stupid?” and it’s clear that this is pure, unadulterated rage.
Explosive and powerhouse-driven, it feels reminiscent of Justice’s early work mixed with heavy metal influences. Think of bombs. Think of buildings on fire. Think of Slayyyter as the hot blonde bombshell she is walking straight out of the rubble unharmed. It’s raw and unfiltered, before completely glitching out in the outro into chaos.
Sounding like something you’d play over a relationship montage, UNKNOWN LOVERZ is a standout track built on a driving bass line that feels like open roads and sunsets. It channels that 2000s-core aesthetic again, but this time through romance shown in lines like “burn you a CD” and “call you from a payphone”. It’s landing with nostalgic warmth.
Digitized synths with subtle pitch bends give the chorus a contemporary radio edge, carrying an infectious energy as she admits, “hold me close, let me know” and the bridge is fully Lana Del Rey-coded with a spoken-word delivery. She speaks slowly “it’s better if you don’t say a word, it makes me wanna chase you down more”. Shoutout to all the avoidants out there. When that acoustic outro hits on the final chorus, it really seals this track’s versatility, proving how much room Slayyyter still has to play with. A reminder we’re only eight (yes eight!) tracks in…
With pure electronic grit, OLD FLING$ feels like a sci-fi track propelled forwards by whimsical rage. I’m theorising that the next three tracks are part of some sort of trilogy which I hope you’ll feel too in their explanations, and this sits as the first entry in that concept. This is the internal. We’ll soon get the external and the sustained.
This one has a somewhat jealous undertone to it, matching the back-and-forth arpeggiated synths that stutter throughout the mix. Slayyyter is faced with real-life run-ins, taking the judgment of feeling jealous and flips it, embracing the pettiness: “something you wanted to say, but I’m by his side.” It oozes a delicious bitchiness, shown through lines like “that shitty poetry only made you the pick-me type”, and it’s echoey and internal. It really does capture the unspoken, lingering thoughts over a messy production loop. While lyrically more continuous than sharp, she lands the final blow: “I see you seething, he’s not leaving here with you tonight.”
+1’ing the track before it, I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS turns internal thoughts into straight aggression. She’s got her way. Shifting to the external, risers and dagger-like synths sit front and centre of the mix, rather than displaced in the background, and her pretentious persona oozes out, taunting “you think I see you? you think I care about you? […] you look funny, are you feeling ok?”.
The chorus hits like the sister track to Charli’s ‘Sympathy is a Knife’, declaring “I’m actually kinda famous” as the ultimate back-off insult. It’s an alarming, explosive after-hours track that is equally sarcastic as it is ego-driven, and it takes aim at the pretenders and uses her success as a weapon: “I didn’t step off the train tonight to get mean-mugged by some ugly bitches”
Then to top off the trilogy, $T. LOSER acts as an electronic crash with an industrial metal sound, sinking into an obsessive spiral. Craving the same energy as previous tracks, Slayyyter is now fully devoted (“I think about you, why don’t you think about me?”), the uneasy production mirroring that sheer desperation.
The production on this one leaves things hanging in the air, letting her plead over a messy arrangement without a standard verse-chorus-bridge boundary. She drops the absolute killer line, “if kids are bumping my shit, that’s a recession indicator,” over washed-out and hypnotically repeated lyrics. With a heavy club mix and those same dagger synths shifting in meaning, it truly leaves this trilogy on a haunting note.
Spiralling back down to earth, WHAT IS IT LIKE, TO BE LIKED? addresses Slayyyter’s imposter syndrome head-on. The production shifts into deep house territory to explore self-vulnerability and severe burnout, with the synths now sounding dubbed-out and worn down. This record is capturing that precise moment the party has gone one step too far and control is lost.
Stripping away, she admits: “ah, fuck all the parties, I’m still nobody […] all that they see in me is a cheaper copy.” And I can’t help but think it gives off this Y2K clubbing, blackout-era Britney, and paparazzi-fuelled madness. kinda vibe. It’s rugged and fast, proving that while Slayyyter may looks untouchable on the surface, everything is slowly unraveling underneath.
And as expected, *PRAYER* deconstructs everything that came before it. Here, we’re really getting the reveal. Away with gloss and away with the armour. We’re now being set up for the heartbreaking finale.
Built on organs playing over a the literal hymn, she recites: “grant that I may seek to comfort rather than be comforted, to understand rather than be understood”, and it captures that sudden, blinding clarity you only feel when stepping out of the dark club and straight into the morning light so perfeftly.
Then as a low blow, a track of pure devotion, BRITTANY MURPHY. pairs that all-too-familiar upbeat production with gut-wrenching lyrics. Slayyyter is literally setting up her own funeral through lines like “remember me beautiful”. Ironically positioning herself much like the actress Brittany Murphy, known for her role in Uptown Girls most famously, it’s a tragic parallel to the “it-girl” archetype (“blonde hair, big eyes like Brittany Murphy”) but hides the heavy pressures underneath the surface.
Over the heavy use of autotune as a stylistic choice to detach from the bleak lyrics (“do you notice all I’ve done”), Slayyyter sings over a major-chord progression, floating and completely subverting from the rest of the album. She admits, “I’m sorry that I left the party” in the bridge, and by now the trashy party life is no longer bulletproof. This one acts like a shimmering, triumphant suicide note that explores both vanity and death, culminating in the eerie: “is my face too disgusting for an open casket?”. The façade truly has been dropped. To think that she thought this would be her last ever album.
By the time we finish that final track, ‘WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA’ has completely scraped off its own gloss, forcing you to stare at the wreckage underneath. What starts as a messy, high-flying lifestyle devolves into a brutally human, tear-stained confession. Slayyyter hasn’t just built an insane, hyper-glitch world with this record but has systematically deconstructed her own untouchable party-girl persona track by track, proving that the untarnished exterior was always a façade masking something far more toxic, messy, and tragic.
Across this LP, she’s channeled raw pop-punk aggression, yet somehow formats all of the chaotic energy into a tight pop record, making a wild, and disorienting ride that leaves you breathless. It’s equal parts exhilarated and guting. If this album was meant to be her final bow, I’m pleased to mention she’s got bigger things coming…
