After a nine-year come-up, the self-described ‘worst girl in America’ is having a breakthrough
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or the past several months, nothing has gotten me through this brutal New York winter quite like Crank, a fiendishly chaotic concoction by the electropop artist Slayyyter. The track is deliriously over-stimulating; the singer tweaks out over record-scratches and squelches and ferociously barrels through a chorus that sounds – and I mean this as a sincere compliment – like a plane crash. In these times of global catastrophe, I have found this soothing.
Slayyyter’s new album Worst Girl in America scratches a similar anarchic itch. Immediate, vertiginous and diabolically cheeky, the after-hours record finds her channelling a ferality that feels rare in our slopified pop culture (cue the rock-tinged Cannibalism), and has garnered breathless hype among those in the know. All five singles released from the project to date have the jet propulsion of someone fueled on years of pop star study and frustrated by, as she bluntly puts it, “my ninth year on the up-and-coming list”.
In that time, the 29-year old artist born Catherine Grace Garner has lingered on the clubby outskirts of pop, making brashly sexual, sharp-elbowed music for a chronically online, largely queer fanbase. Since breaking out with glitchy, Y2K-coded tracks in the late 2010s, she had done several cycles of chasing hits and thinking “maybe this time it’s gonna happen, and it doesn’t”, she tells me in late March. On the verge of quitting the business, she tried one last hail mary – to finally make the sleazy, propulsive, iPod-era music that she says she has always loved, whether or not it worked for an algorithm or viral bites. Her aim was simple but risky: to “make something cool – fuck anything that sounds commercial, fuck TikTok”.
