The 5 Best Songs On Slayyyter’s ‘WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA’

Sorry, these pages weren’t trying to be a hayyyter. It’s just that nobody sold them on Slayyyter right. The brash electro-pop moniker of Catherine Garner has been on an absolute tear this year behind the release of her third album, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, finally breaking her out as an alternative pop star to take notice of. Yeah, she has toured with Kesha over the last year, but for all the people begrudging her as nothing but a sound-a-like of the trash-pop anti-star made from 2020s end time vibes, something tells me you, too, haven’t been listening close enough either.

On this end, it was the the TURNSTILE effect rippling through her taking flight on “BIRDS” that got me to lean in and discovery for myself that the whole electroclash revival other sites framed as a different word was actually pretty fitting for today’s culture climate where you can’t merely just dance away the weight of the world — you needed something angstier with a bit more digital bite behind its teeth. Enter Slayyter’s WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, an album that proves her worth to a world that wants nothing more than to watch people like her crash and burn out.

A hypnotic distortion of high octane techno, crunchy EBM, and smears of witch house vapor, her dance nation is made for the times by embracing the other side of the tracks. There’s 14 solid ones for that matter, but these five songs are the best of the WOR$T.

5. “BRITTANY MURPHY”

WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA closes on what feels like the exit ramp from all of the debauchery that preceded its party animalism, but definitely nothing less in its explicit nature. As she parallels her own self image against the tragically late and embattled millennial acting icon Brittany Murphy, we’re given privy to the real darkness that remains once the strobe lights from the club and flashing lights of fame dim, as Slayyyter intensely ideates on suicidal tendencies in her own flair for life-in-bold-font distraction. “Blonde curls, big eyes like Brittany Murphy / Superstar girl, ballerina twirling / Make them all know I was great / ‘Til I crashed out.” As much as WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA invites her listeners into a world of uninhibited recklessness, the real portrait of standing in those beat-up Chanels is anything but ideal, and that’s an important to sidenote as to how Slayyyter got here — and where’s she’s going next.

4. “$T. LOSER”

Slayyyter describes the overarching theme behind WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA as being a “portrait of a woman from the Midwest”, with her starfucked persona pulling from stories from her upbringing, her time as a hair stylist as well as character sketches of the people she encountered along the way. It was also her last-ditch effort at making a bonafide breakout in the scene after becoming dejected by a brutal major label music industry complex and its creative restraints with her previous efforts. With savage claw marks made with a fresh set of glossed tips and industrial dance beat maximalism, she digs into the pretentious haters who look down on her roots while live rent-free in her misery. “I get sicker by the minute, shit you can’t manufacture,” she asserts. “I think about money, drugs, chains on my chest / I think I get low bill, but I’m the fucking main event.” It’s all been fuel for this moment. She’s made it by breaking the rules on her own terms.

3. “DANCE…”

I’ve never seen a live Slayyyter show in full, but I imagine this is one hell of a way to open up the pit on the dance floor. The revved-up acceleration gets adrenaline peaking from the very start, leading into a quick hit climax of space age Moroder-styles electronics simmering into the dark that runs a sizzling current concurrently throughout. Synth riffs catch a rubberized peel out across the turntable, all while Slayyyter commands some of her own unhappy and fucked up feelings with a sprinkle of hate toward creatures crawling toward her with the only way one can in that moment: to own the floor while she dances on her own. “I came here to party, and you know what you started / I’ll end it in the morning when you seem unimportant,” she sirens over the cascading synth wall. That’s one way to announce the party has only started because you’re here.

2. “GAS STATION”

Somebody had to do it. We needed a modern day redesign of Crystal Castles’ goth electronica without all of the baggage of its creators attached to it — although, this isn’t to say that this isn’t a song that doesn’t carry around its own ample emotional baggage either. “GAS STATION” ebbs at the core of WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA as one of Slayyyter’s more resoundingly vulnerable songs, recounting a traumatic childhood memory when her own father abandoned her at the pump. “So sad to say we’re living separate lives / Time is passin’ me by, but I can’t delete you out.” The listen is haunted by reasons multi-dimensional in both its synthscape and storytelling. In this case, the ghost lurking in the background of Catherine Garner’s life can’t be given up, even if she tried.

1. “BEAT UP CHANELS”

“Sex, money, drugs, chains on my chest, vintage Celine / Diamond grills, champagne bottles, I get for free / I want sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed / Fuck him, go into his closet, steal some of his Supreme.” And that’s not even the half of it, though “BEAT UP CHANELS” is 100% the song that packs in the most quotable moments and arguably makes for generational electro-pop anthem for this new wave of hedonistic revelers at this point. The lyrical edgelording is one thing, but the way which track itself connects the dots between the worked up so sexual mechanics of The Faint and Peaches, the spooky season ultraviolence of Crystal Castles and SALEM, and Slayyyter’s own vein of horny hedonism is really what pops this thing off to the fullest. “I want beat-up Chanels, I want something for real.” Girl, you can take whatever the fuck you want with that kind when your demands don’t mince words with a hard beat to bat.