Source : the age
The line between dedication and desperation is razor-thin. For almost a decade, emails about Slayyyter’s “unapologetic new video” or “raucous new club banger” peppered my inbox like the April rains: persistent, relentless, dank.
While playing on the same smart-dumb hyperpop eccentricity of PC Music and 100 Gecs, early singles like Daddy AF and Throatzillaaa were so outrageous that, for years, I marked Slayyyter as a tacky provocateur and publicist’s emails went unread. (Look, I’m a prude.)
Then, midway through last year, came Beat Up Chanel$. The single, somewhere between Y2K-era ghettotech and nu-rave, grabbed everyone’s attention. Its video – filled with booze, guns and trucker hats – set off a wave of unexpected anticipation around Slayyyter’s third album, Wor$t Girl in America. Not to mention a personal reckoning: was I wrong about Slayyyter?
A comment under an online review of the album sums up its appeal: “This album made me realise I am awesome and hot.” Wor$t Girl in America is validation for the pyjamas-and-slides to the mall set. It is hangover music for a generation that can’t see its future. If ever a set of songs existed for double-fisting pre-mixed tinnies at a boggy festival, this is it. Add in a viral Coachella set that highlighted its communal rush, and finally Slayyyter had her breakout moment after years of artistic hustle.
“I was pretty shocked. I just wasn’t expecting people to connect with it so much,” the 29-year-old, born Catherine Grace Garner, says of the album’s success. “I think people see a lot of themselves in it, or see a lot of their own hometowns. I feel everyone can feel the pain and aggression in a lot of the music. It’s a therapeutic thing to scream at the top of your lungs. A lot of people are resonating with it, which is funny and nice.”
Slayyyter’s speaking over Zoom from her hometown – St Louis, Missouri – following a triumphant homecoming to launch her Wor$t Girl in the World Tour, which hits Australia this month. Her persona might be pure trashbag – see her hedonist’s anthem Crank (“I get so gay off that tequila!” ) – but Slayyyter doesn’t live like that.
“My music is so angsty and aggressive, but I try to keep a very calm environment around myself on tour,” she says. “I don’t really, like, go out. I’m on vocal rest a lot, and it’s a lot more chill. I kind of just rest and take care of myself and try to give the best shows possible.”
More than a wild phenomenon, Wor$t Girl in America was a career resurrection. As the New York Times noted, Slayyyter is “an overnight success 10 years in the making”. She dropped her first mixtape in 2019 and has hustled ever since. When popheads online banished her to the “Khia asylum” – a disparaging grouping of mid-tier pop stars, named for the one-hit wonder of My Neck, My Back (Lick It) – Slayyyter persevered.
“I’ve always been comfortable with where I am,” she says. “I try not to expect anything more than what I’m receiving in life, and I don’t really think about the way [my music’s] received. As a little girl I always dreamed that I would have big stardom, I guess, but as I’ve gotten older it’s more just about making things I really love.”
Barely two years ago, she was on the verge of stopping altogether. In interviews, she’s discussed losing money on tours and merchandise to the point the project felt unsustainable. Wor$t Girl’s closer Brittanny Murphy – a song about depression and suicidal ideation – doubles as a meta farewell to the chase for musical relevancy (“Do you notice all I’ve done? Do you know it’s all I want?” ).
“I was planning to quit music,” says Slayyyter. “I would have probably kept doing it just as a hobby but I wanted to put a halt to doing it professionally, or even as Slayyyter, and just go back to doing it as a side project and do other things.”
What was she thinking she’d do had she given up on music? “I’m not sure. I don’t really have a college degree, so I guess we’ll never know,” she laughs. “It would have had to have been something creative, or something in music but just on the other side of things. But I guess the universe had different plans, which is nice.”
‘I went into every studio session treating it like the last thing I would ever do.’Slayyyter
Slayyyter’s last album Starf—er – a moody mélange of Italo-disco, Gagaisms and Pino Donaggio’s scores for Brian De Palma’s films – earned enough of a push online that Columbia Records (a subsidiary of Sony Music) took a gamble on the singer for what she’d imagined would be her last album. With nothing to lose, she went all out.
What’s most remarkable about Slayyyter’s breakthrough is that it has come from the most raw and abrasive music of her career. Revisiting sounds she grew up listening to on her iPod, tracks evoke early-’00s “electroclash”, the era of Justice and Soulwax, Bang Gang parties and Flickr galleries of sweaty clubgoers. Her writing – most notably on Gas Station, a song that segues movingly from a bad romance to her relationship with her estranged father – added a more vulnerable edge.
“I think it was definitely born out of wanting it to be the last project I would leave behind and what I would feel if it was the last thing I ever released,” Slayyyter says of Wor$t Girl. “I wanted to make something I was very fulfilled by and that felt like it was right for me to say, ‘This is my last piece of art’, or the last imprint I will have on the world to leave behind. I went into every studio session treating it like the last thing I would ever do.”
Six months since its coronation, she’s started hinting at what follows: an “inverse album” – a playful spin on the deluxe album treatment that she’s calling a “brother album or a part two” – titled Wor$t Man in the World. New single Brand New Chanel$ – the Chanels are no longer beat up – connects The Killers and Balearic dance. It’s anthemic as ever, but airier than anything on Wor$t Girl.
“Instead of a typical deluxe album or a remix album, I wanted to make more music – and new music that feels inspired by the album that came before it,” she says. “I’ve had more life experiences and a different perspective after this album took off – going through personal life issues and thinking more about family things and wanting to lead more with forgiveness in my heart – so I wanted to make music that felt like a flip to the album. It’s a little lighter and less aggressive, more soft and sad.”
After almost stopping, she’s now contending with a different sort of pressure that comes after the success of Wor$t Girl in America. “I’m trying not to put pressure on anything and not get in my head too much,” she says. “I feel like anything I make is what I’m meant to make, and it’s more about a release or an expression. I’m not really worried about what it does afterwards. I just make what I want to listen to. Everything I do is just what I love and what I want to hear or what I feel like I’m not hearing in the world.”
When she looks back at her journey, can she understand why it took such a circuitous route or why the other albums didn’t take off to this level? “I think it’s just timing and that it just wasn’t meant to be, you know?” she says. “I feel that way about a lot of things. You can’t force things. I think [those albums] just weren’t right and I hadn’t really reached inside myself or I hadn’t really hit my stride yet with the visuals and music. And I think this one hit off because I finally found it. I unlocked it.”
Slayyyter’s new single Brand New Chanel$ is out now. Her Wor$t Girl in the World Tour plays at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on August 9-10, Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on August 14, and Forum Melbourne on August 17-18.
