Slayyyter, Recession Indicator

Worst Girl in America is about class. From bleak Midwestern landscapes to sparkly outfits, Slayyyter’s 2026 album takes us on a tour of life among the lower classes, where partying and DIY art are among the few outlets for those who feel economically and culturally marooned. It also looks and sounds like the film projected for decades inside my head.

Slayyyter created videos for every song, and they inhabit a dark, uncanny Middle America visual landscape.  Slayyyter, born Catherine Grace Garner outside of St. Louis, had a hand in seemingly everything creative, from sewing bedazzled costumes to directing videos. The songs and visuals on Worst Girl in America work together to create a more fully realized view of Americans living at the bottom and thereabouts.

That view both is and isn’t sexy as hell. This album is as much a fun dance vibe as a primal scream.

The breakout song, “Crank,” makes you want to dance and bang your head. Slayyyter mixes pop vocals, rap-like delivery, and scream-singing. By drawing on dance and harder genres, “Crank” captures the ecstasy of partying and the life-deadening reasons that can make it feel necessary for some.  “Crank” refers to cranking up the energy, the volume, the level of partying, but also to meth.  

Meth is a means of escapism for some lower-income people in the rural Midwest, devastated by an economy concentrating wealth in the hands of the elite. It’s also known to destroy lives already ravaged by a socio-economic system requiring impoverishment for many. It is also the drug that landed my youngest brother in the hospital.  Slayyyter’s biggest hit to date is a banger that conjures destitution, a difficult pairing to get right: “Bitch, I’m on junkie time, drop dimes, big truck crank up.” As the breakout star of 2025-26, I’d say she nails it.  

Born in St. Louis and raised in poverty nearby in southern Illinois, I see my experience of the area in the Lynchian aesthetic Slayyyter creates, including the creepy bunny that pops up repeatedly across videos in a nod to Lynch’s 2002 short film, Rabbits. If you meld the homes in her videos with the apartments in Barry Jenkins’ 2016 coming-of-age drama, Moonlight, her dimly lit interiors evoke something from my past.  The homes in the latter half of my childhood were places to escape from, not to. The walls had holes; the decades-old carpet reeked; the rooms were infested with roaches and fleas.  

The outdoor scenes in Worst Girl in America‘s music videos are equally forlorn: run-down gas stations, junked cars, and old workout equipment in front yards. In “Brittany Murphy”, Slayyyter rides a carousel horse on the lawn while wearing a tiara and holding sparklers like cigarettes. She paints herself as the queen of dilapidation, on the verge of a breakdown and possibly death. She’s partying, but in isolation, a coping mechanism that’s harmful but also serves as self-assertion: 

“Father, please forgive me for all my actions / Found the box that I tried to hide my past in / Yeah / Help myself to these filthy little habits / Stumble, asking the bouncer, ‘Where’s my jacket?'”

She apologizes, but undercuts the apology by emphasizing her agency in “helping” herself to drugs, alcohol, sex – whatever she needs and desires to enjoy herself for a while and escape harsh reality.

She knows that the path she’s on often leads to early death and doesn’t shy away from that reality: “Tell them I am sorry for / The gun inside my bedroom drawer.”  Later in the song, she brings the party back by imagining her wake as the good time wakes are meant to be: 

“Is my face too disgusting for open casket? / Make sure they got red roses, I’m old fashioned / Make sure you book a good band to get it crackin’ / Too busy to hang next week, so quit asking.”

Even in her imagined death, she wants her desires met and for everyone to enjoy themselves. Partying is an assertion of life itself, and in this case, it’s a form of life after death.

“Beat Up Chanel$” is another dance song, though much of the music video depicts the opposite of joy in bodily movement. She’s the only woman on couches full of men wearing T-shirts, flannels, jeans, tank tops, and trucker caps. Everyone is smoking and drinking listlessly, forever sinking into the aged, drab décor.  It’s not hard to understand why a woman would dream of pretty things to transport her, but the scene is so depressing, and the speaker so poor, that even in her wildest fantasies, she can only imagine buying secondhand fashion:

“I wanna dye my hair every pretty shade of pastel / I want nasty afterparties, banged up at the motel / I want beat-up Chanels, I want something for real.”

In another scene from this video, she’s fiercely, sexily stalking down the street, wielding a bat, flanked by the men from the couch. Despite being the only woman, here she’s in charge. She might not get everything she wants, but her endurance in the face of her environment makes her a baddie, and she’s not going to pretend otherwise and make herself small.  

She goes even bigger in “$T. LOSER”: “I think I get a low bill, but I’m the fucking main event.”  She’s made songs out of a father who left her at a gas station. She’s rocked a dress made of empty cigarette boxes and garbage bags.  She’s proven she can craft art out of the ugly, a skill that deserves recognition.  

Speaking to a boyfriend, a rival, or the listener, she sings, “I think about you, do you think about me? / Do you think you’d win in a fight if you saw me out on the street?” This is the swagger of someone who feels her life slipping away, knowing she deserves more, and, agitated by that, becomes defiantly antagonistic to make herself seen.  

When she sings, “I think you’re super softcore,” my mind swirls with the folks from middle-class backgrounds who lectured me about class, the people who tried to intervene in my work while being less effective than I was, all those who talked to me sweetly to manipulate me and assumed I didn’t catch on. By surviving everything I did and dealing with their unjustified egos, I kept proving I was the tough one, even if their self-limiting perspective wouldn’t see it.

For people from my background, these songs and videos provide catharsis. Slayyyter is the woman underappreciated by a boyfriend, scorned by a father, made to feel she’ll never get anywhere. She exerts power by bedazzling her life. Slayyyter is beloved by the queer community, especially its poor and downwardly mobile members. Her art is a testament to being told you’re not good enough and yet flying, beautifully, in the face of that: “I think about you, you don’t think about me / So pretentious looking down at my St. Loser misery.”

Lower- and middle-class Americans are becoming poorer and poorer; we’ve lost social safety nets that once existed – at least for some – and our rights are under vicious assault. Slayyyter sings, “If kids are bumping my shit, that’s a recession indicator.” We aren’t without hope in our political moment. We’re organizing and inventing versions of ourselves: beautified and beautiful, dancing through it as we continue to struggle. Slayyyter is our breakout icon.

Crank it!