Slayyyter crawls in through the window of her pseudo-childhood home, her long blond waves damp from a night out and the fringe of her Western jacket swinging as she reaches for a beer in the fridge. Her dad is screaming at her as she escapes to her room; as he bangs on the bedroom door, she reaches for a shotgun.
There, surrounded by plush bunny toys, pink lace curtains and a cross on the wall, Slayyyter shoots her dad. And so begins the music video for “Dance…,” the opening track of her new album, “Worst Girl in America.”
Slayyyter directed it herself, and says it’s a fitting start to an album that, on the surface, is erupting with club pop anthems, dripping in electric guitar-lined excess and her humble desire for “money, drugs, chains on my chest.” On a deeper level, Slayyyter’s “Worst Girl in America” is the lonely girl from a small Midwestern town, one who she says craved a healthy relationship with her father— and a way out.
“Of course I’m not the Hollywood girl. I’m like the trashy Missouri bar girl,” Slayyyter said. “That’s who the “Worst Girl in America” is.”
“Of course I’m not the Hollywood girl. I’m like the trashy Missouri bar girl,” Slayyyter says.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Slayyyter, born Catherine Garner, grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, shaped by the early aughts tabloid photographs of Lindsay Lohan and the sounds of Lady Gaga’s “Artpop” and Kesha’s “Animal” in the wired headphones of her iPod. As a child dancer, performance was Slayyyter’s youth, and as a college dropout from the University of Missouri, she turned to SoundCloud to share the music blossoming from her at-home recording sessions.
At 23, she released her self-titled 2019 mixtape, “Slayyyter,” a bubblegum Gwen Stefani-inspired pop collection half recorded in a “messy a—” closet in her mom’s house. From it was birthed the Twitter-viral hit “Mine” and the nasty “Daddy AF,” which energized the soundtracks for “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies” and the Oscar-winning “Anora.”
From there, Slayyyter took off running, landing opening slots for Charli XCX and releasing two albums. At 29, after years painstakingly building her career in L.A. and fresh after touring with Kesha, Slayyyter is dragging her music back where it began.
The new album tells a story through the fragmented memory of her early youth: In “Worst Girl,” there’s “Crank,” a pumping, screaming dance single that demands its listeners to “Crank it!” beside “Unknown Loverz,” a dreamy, wistful recollection of unrequited love. “I’m Actually Kinda Famous” sneers and taunts a portrayal of fame over synths, and “Cannibalism!” is wrapped in youthful desire and garage rock fuzz.
“I wanted to paint a hazy portrait of the Midwest but not in such a literal way,” she said. “It’s almost like a real moment, inspired by summer nights in my teen years, wandering around golf courses and drinking warm beer cause that’s all we could find in our parents’ basements.”
The album releases Friday, after months of building up fans’ excitement around singles and self-directed music videos. With a tour looming in the summer and a first-time Coachella slot coming next month, Slayyyter is winding up for a momentous year.
Outside The Times’ office, with highway and airplane traffic buzzing by on a cloudless afternoon, Slayyyter walked into our interview in Moschino kitten heels and her now-signature fringe jacket. Bubbly and friendly, she poked holes with her heels in the paper backdrop as she posed for portraits and gushed over Brittany Murphy’s 2003 film “Uptown Girls.” As the pictures flashed, I spotted an American flag in the room and suggested she use it as a backdrop to allude to the album.
She shook her head. That wasn’t what it meant; “Worst Girl in America” isn’t really about Americana, or wearing a flag as a badge. It’s complicated. In it, Slayyyter explores her hometown roots, family dynamics and desire at her most trashy, mournful, hungry and loud; as the “Worst Girl in America,” Slayyyter is raw.
Obviously the title really jumps out at you and it’s almost playful in that it says, “I’m the worst girl here but I don’t care what you think of me.” Can you talk about the title and where that came from?
It could be a term of endearment from friends, because I grew up being friends with a lot of skater kids that would call each other “the worst.”
But it was also from being insecure or feeling out of place or hated. I’ve always felt on the defense or disliked. Just kind of a loser, I guess. So I feel like the Worst Girl in America is almost the voice in your head that is telling you what you are, even if you’re not that, that’s how you feel.
You’ve been in the entertainment industry for almost a decade now. How does it feel to look back on that early Slayyyter music to what you’re making now?
It feels nice to be a little more seasoned and to have grown into my taste, but sometimes I get sad just because I feel like in my very first project, I really was plucked out of St. Louis. I was a hair salon receptionist, no family connections to any entertainment industry, let alone the music industry.
I always felt very out of place. My extensions would show in the back, and I would go to parties and I would be so nervous that I would drink to overcompensate. I look at my early beginnings in music and I just am like, “God, I wish I had figured it out a little sooner,” but I wouldn’t change it for the world, knowing what I know now.
There’s bits and pieces of my early music that are all over this album. “Daddy AF” was the first time I ever rapped on a song and that felt so good so I continued it. There would be no “Crank” without “Daddy AF.” Everything has its fingerprint on other things.
I saw a lot of allusions and references in your lyrics and videos to “trashy icons,” like Lindsay Lohan with the Chanel purse ankle monitor. What is it about the “girls gone bad” that was inspiring to you?
I feel like they’re all so largely misunderstood, especially Lindsay Lohan. I could do a TED Talk on my feelings on Lindsay Lohan because she was so judged. I felt seen by her because she is someone who had issues with her father early on and I relate to that a lot.
I feel like when you have a hard childhood, a hard start at life, it’s going to affect you for the rest of your life. You’re going to be a girl who drinks too much at parties. It’s hard to get buttoned up and take things seriously. I feel like I’ve always been one of those girls, wild and getting in trouble for drinking too much at the club. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding of them, of where they come from or things they’ve been through that contribute to the way they are.
I’ve always felt that way. If people see me at a party and I’m off my face, that might be something to judge at first, but there’s a sadness and a misunderstanding of why that kind of self-medication might be necessary for me or for anyone, you know?
I really reached a point of frustration with making music and thought that this was going to be one of the last projects I would make.
You have a large gay audience and really came up in the underground queer pop space. How do you weave in queerness as an artist and speak to that community?
I feel like it’s such a natural thing. I hate when artists pander. I find it really capitalistic and wrong and weird when artists will specifically target a gay audience. I’ve never shot for the gay audience. I feel like I am that audience. Like in high school, my two best friends were gay and we would ride around and listen to Lady Gaga and smoke weed in the car. I was going to Marina and the Diamonds concerts. I loved Lana Del Rey from Tumblr.
I create from a place of just expression and I feel like in queer spaces, that kind of music always feels very true. It resonates and it feels right.
“I really reached a point of frustration with making music and thought that this was going to be one of the last projects I would make,” Slayyyter said.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
You’re talking about all these icons that you grew up with, like Marina and Lana. For you to have toured with Kesha this past summer, that must have been huge. What is something that you learned from that?
Oh my gosh. I think just her fearlessness, her professionalism, her coolness, her aura. Yeah, her swagger. She is someone who, I would not be an artist if it weren’t for her. Her music changed my life. Like hearing Sleazy for the first time, and when she debuted, she felt very undone. She would just be free and wear glitter on her face and have feathers in her hair and her music was very unapologetically brash and tongue-in-cheek with the lyrics. She would say edgy s— that no one had said before. I feel like she has inspired me a lot in my music to just take those leaps and not take things too seriously, you know?
Watching her perform, It felt very much like seeing her taking back something that was hers and it just felt very emotional to watch every night, honestly.
I saw you got signed to a major label (Columbia Records) but you were saying you still make a lot of your costumes and direct a lot of your music videos. How have you really held on to this DIY ethos while now associating yourself with a bigger label?
Honestly, they [Columbia] have been so amazing in letting me do my thing, which has been really nice. There’s a risk when you do something yourself. Things can look chopped and I know that. I’m well aware. I’m well aware that it’s not always going to be pulled off, but for the most part I’ve gotten pretty lucky that everything comes together at like the last hour.
And it doesn’t have to do with budget. I just feel like I need to do it. I need to have hands on everything. With this album, it is so specifically this thing in my head and it can’t be up for interpretation because it just feels like my life and it feels like my childhood.
I made a lot of the videos with my friend Kate. The footage she has of me… at the time, I was like, “Wait, this is so creative and cool.” And we watch it and just both sit and laugh because it’s really bad. At one point, I thought it would be cool to do like a pageantry baton spinning dance. I can’t spin a baton. It’s actually really hard. So it just looks really bad. It’s harder than it looks. I said, “It’ll be so retro, like a 1950s pageant.” It was nothing of the sort.
I loved “Gas Station.” It brought me this vision of isolation under the overhead lighting and this disconnect and chasing of attention in modern relationships. That’s what I got out of it at least. How do you feel like you talked about relationships or modern love in the album?
“Gas Station” is a funny example. I started writing that song about an ex-relationship with the hook and as I got more into writing it, I started talking about a situation that happened with my dad actually. We got in a fight and he made me get out of the car at a gas station and just drove away. Maybe that’s too trauma dump-y to just drop that, but I found it interesting that when you’re in a bad relationship and you look at relationships with your parents, there can be a lot of parallels.
When you pick the wrong guys, or men who don’t really care for you, and you have to chase them down for attention, how that can feel like the same relationship you’ve had with a parent.
Looking to what’s ahead, what are you really excited about following this album? Do you have a vision for your tour or where do you see yourself going next as an artist?
I do. I’m excited for touring. I feel like that is my favorite piece of the puzzle with being an artist. I love playing live. I’m excited to design out a show and a stage that feels like stepping into a set of one of these videos.
I want to keep making music. I’ve been working on songs and I wouldn’t really call anything a deluxe, but I’ve been testing the waters of a repackaging of this project and having a bit more collaborations and different versions. I don’t really know what it will be yet, but I’ve just been toying with different songs and different things and maybe that leads to nothing, but maybe it doesn’t. I also have a couple songs on the back burner that didn’t make the album that I really really still want to put out.
I would love for this album to soundtrack whatever people need it to soundtrack. That’s for them to decide, whether it’s crying in your room, drinking with your friends in the back of someone’s pickup truck out in a muddy field or whatever you people want.
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