This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
When Slayyyter made the album Worst Girl in America, she thought of herself as a failure. For nine years, she’d been on the cusp of success, without ever actually achieving it: not-quite-hits and tours that didn’t break even. Worst Girl in America, she said in one interview, was a final throw of the dice, an attempt to make a record that “if I died after it comes out, I would be proud of it”.
The album might have been born of burnout, but it lit a fire under her. Worst Girl in America, released in March, secured her a deal with a major label (Columbia) and her first Billboard number one, as well as her first entry in the UK charts. A ferocious set at the tastemaking US festival Coachella confirmed it: Slayyyter, now 29, has become the star that she spent most of the last decade pretending to be.
Starting out, she was Catherine Grace Garner, making music between shifts as a receptionist at a hairdresser in St Louis, Missouri. Her aggressively processed DIY pop led her to be lumped in with the extremely online hyperpop scene, along with her regular collaborator Ayesha Erotica (a pseudonym, you will be amazed to learn).
Slayyyter says that she was never comfortable with the genre, but it’s a label that fits in some crucial ways. One of hyperpop’s defining features is a commitment to artifice: not just heavily processed vocals and manipulated sounds, but identity too. It doesn’t feel like coincidence that two of its key figures, Ayesha Erotica and Sophie (who worked frequently with Charli XCX, before dying in an accident in 2021), were both trans.
Hyperpop’s premise is that the invented can replace the real, and Slayyyter embraced that heady mix of irony and fantasy. The photos she supplied to magazines were so obviously edited, there were doubts about whether she existed at all: “I was kind of like this weird slutty Facetuned cyborg girl. People didn’t know if I was real, people thought the whole thing was doctored Photoshop. They didn’t know if I was even a girl.”
That persona meshed brilliantly with the music she made, which extrapolated from the oversexed robot sound of Britney Spears’ 2007 album Blackout. One of Slayyyter’s most-referenced influences, Blackout is both a triumphant pop record and a harrowing document of a star in freefall. On it, Spears appears commanding as she takes on her critics, a woman taking charge of her own narrative; in reality, she was months from psychiatric collapse.
Sonically, Worst Girl in America moves into rockier territory than Slayyyter’s ever been in before. She’s described it as an attempt to recreate the “iPod music” she listened to in the noughties, citing indie-electropop act Crystal Castles in particular and “the kind of thing you’d hear on Gossip Girl” more generally. It sounds, incongruously but immaculately, like the first Strokes album if Max Martin had produced it.
It’s also an advance lyrically. Slayyyter has always been very witty and very profane, and those traits are fully present on Worst Girl in America, especially on the first half of the album, where she leans in hard to the party girl character. “I want sex, money, bitches and the stickiest weed,” she chants infectiously on “Beat Up Chanels”. On “Old Technology”, she brags: “You copy-paste the vibe, I never chase the vibe.”
But the end of side A dips into melancholy with “Gas Station”, which relates a breakup that could be pulled from Slayyyter’s real midwestern working-class backstory: ditched at the roadside by a man who was “always actin’ like I wasn’t as cool”.
Side A starts at the same location, in the gorgeously sad “Unknown Loverz”: “It’s love, it’s love, it’s love,” she trills, “the more that I chase him, the faster he runs.”
And from there, things get weirder and darker. The pivot of the album into its final tragedy comes in “What Is It Like, to Be Liked?” This starts like another club anthem but then the boasts turn hollow: “I need your attention/I bleed for attention,” she coos. By the end of the song, the Slayyyter character is giving up on fame. “I’m still nobody,” she frets, “But I’ma go out like a star.”
That sets the scene for the album’s last track, “Brittany Murphy” — a song named after the luminous, brilliant actress who died in 2009 of a multiple drugs overdose (probably compounded by the severe weight loss she underwent in response to on-set comments about her size). In it, Slayyyter imagines her own suicide. “Is my face too disgusting for open casket?/ Make sure they got red roses, I’m old fashioned.”
It’s the traditional end of the female fame cycle: self-destruction. Worst Girl in America isn’t just a collection of bangers: it’s a whole narrative arc about the pursuit of celebrity and the collapse of identity. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you want it so badly, you can’t comprehend living without it.
By imagining the bleakest version of her own story, Slayyyter has transformed herself into the opposite. She’s killed herself on record to be reborn in her career; she’s spun a fiction to discover what sounds like the truest version of her own voice.
Worst Girl in America is chaotic, intoxicating and deliciously cynical about Slayyyter’s own industry. Because of it, fame, with everything good and bad that it entails, is now hers for keeps.
