August Moon | Contributing Illustrator

In theory, a good pop star is a pop star who knows their place. If a mega-celebrity understands they have a huge audience, they might make something that appeals to the masses. A smaller artist, on the other hand, might feel the liberty to explore more experimental sounds. After all, if you are not famous enough to flop, there is no reason to fear flopping. 

This rule, then, would make St. Louis’ own Slayyyter, known as Catherine Garner off stage, an anomaly. Even when relatively unknown and releasing music on SoundCloud and Twitter in the late 2010s, she already imagined herself atop pop’s pecking order. “They play me on the radio / The paparazzi follows me wherever I go,” she sang on her 2019 track “Celebrity.” Although both self-aware and tongue-in-cheek (later in the song, she says she’s “made it onto the D-list”), the reality was that her music was not charting anywhere.

But through sheer will, hard work, and an excellent new album, Slayyyter is finally breaking through — not to the mainstream, but to alt-pop’s respectable middle-tier, where artists like FKA Twigs, Kim Petras, and Caroline Polachek cavort. On “WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA,” her best album thus far, Slayyyter conjures up an alluring midwestern hellscape studded with cigarettes, gas stations, iPods, and tequila, where the only reprieve is a bratty attitude and beats so loud they blow your ears out.  

In contrast to her previous work, which was coated in a sparkly hyperpop veneer, “WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA” is an album that stomps by on intensity and abrasiveness. “CRANK,” despite Slayyyter’s position as a pop artist, does not abide by typical pop conventions, trading melody and guitar for screaming and industrial machinery screeches. The song succeeds merely through Slayyyter’s intensity with which she handles the task and through its absurdism. “Crank it!” is a refrain that could mean a number of nefarious things, but she yells it so convincingly that we just blindly agree. “YES GODDD” strikes a similar note through a dubstep-like drop and carnal howling, as does “$T. LOSER,” named for the city she comes from. “So pretentious looking down / At my St. Loser misery,” she says, painting a picture where Missouri is as confining as it is expansive.  

She bares her teeth on “CANNABALISM,” snarling about a love obsession over electric guitar licks. “If I don’t have you, I’ll die,” she sings, her presentation akin to a young, mud-coated Ke$ha (complete with every S replaced with an $) who has choice words for anyone unfamiliar with her name. Slayyyter’s last record was more watered-down, so it’s refreshing to hear that she’s clearly realized it’s more important her music be loud than her music be palatable. 

After so many club bangers, earnest but relatively surface-level, it might be easy to conclude that all Slayyyter is concerned with is which bar she is hopping to next. But towards the album’s end, her seemingly indestructible attitude begins cracking. “Do you know me from somewhere?” she asks on “I’M ACTUALLY KIND OF FAMOUS,” over a struttish instrumental surely made for stomping through the bar to throw a beer at the guy who laughed when you said you were a singer, revealing Slayyyter’s insecurity in her lack of recognition and success thus far. And on “WHAT IS IT LIKED, TO BE LIKED?” she asks the titular question, a surprising admission for an artist who has built such a devoted (albeit small) cult following. For all of the trashy pop-star glamour Slayyyter presents, she offers an equal dose of isolation. Floating between stardom and normalcy, it seems, isn’t very nice at all. 

On “BRITTANY MURPHY,” the album’s closer, Slayyyter goes fully morbid, imagining how her own death might be looked at. “Tell them I was such a funny girl / Annoying’s probably a better word,” she sings, her voice distorted by autotune, punctuated by guitar and electronic swells. It recontextualizes the whole album as reckless hedonism not for its own sake, but as a distraction from the dread of living an unremembered life. “Is my face too disgusting for open casket?” she wonders later in the song, the album’s most intimate confession, proving her braggadocious attitude to be merely a channeling of her desperation to be known. Pop music can be a mere soundtrack for a head-banging night at the club, a soundtrack Slayyyter proves she’s perfected, but she also shows it to be more potent when born from the vulnerabilities that wrack us all.