Little girls and gay boys the world over love pop music because they once loved playing dress-up. It is the Olympic-level world championships of dress-up, wherein the women who’ve mastered the art of fantasy and disguise are toured through coliseums across the globe to sell whatever new and beautiful dream they’ve invented. A woman stands alone on a stage, lit up before thousands, with electric blue hair, pyrotechnics shooting out of her breasts, wrapped in a rainbow bodice, singing about being in love– and we believe she’s real. We believe she is an actual woman you could be. She’s standing right there.
The next time you see her in your city, two or three years later, she’s totally different. She has hot-pink braids that reach the floor, she can do a new trick with her voice, and her clothes reflect light like a robot. Another dream, and you believe it just as much as the last one. The people who cherish pop stars do it because they know they’re a limited resource; not everybody can do it year after year, album after album, world after world.
As it follows, who is a serious pop star is a matter of great contention in the world of pop enthusiasts, and with just about any old dress-up-playing TikToker able to throw their hat in the ring these days, the jury on who can enter the upper echelons is stricter than ever.
The jury’s been out on Slayyyter for seven years, precious time in a field that affords you an enormous advantage for being 23-ish. She’s decidedly pretty good at dress-up, building a fanbase of pop aficionados with her astute eye for aesthetics and scrappy rawness. Still, after three full-length projects failed to generate any undeniable viral singles or chart domination, she seemed doomed to limbo, a niche curiosity for only the most dedicated to the genre.
Slayyyter transformed dramatically between projects like a star should: a neon McBling Britney Spears emulator for her first mixtape, a metallic punk Avril Lavigne type for her debut album Troubled Paradise, and a Gaga-style chiffon-wrapped femme fatale for its follow-up Starfucker. Each project was more polished and focused than the last, but the star-anointing public remained unconvinced.
Reasons the proposition seemed dubious: “Daddy AF”, one of her earliest, and arguably her biggest single, is sort of a joke song – raucously energetic but deeply goofy, not a song you want to be your calling card. Then, her association with hyperpop, an irony-laden scene of abrasive gonzo pop music whose biggest star and innovator, Charli XCX, sometimes made her seem downmarket and derivative. Perhaps most fatally, her gauche gay Twitter meme stage name (i.e, “Slayyy, mother!”), which, for many, automatically filed her into the commercially doomed category of “gay guy music”.
Though she insists “Slayyyter” is a riff on Slater from Dazed & Confused, the early adoption of her hyperfeminine persona by ravenous gay male fans silenced that backstory. It’s like the “Childish Gambino” of pop star names, randomly generated to sound like a pop star that could only exist after countless others already had. The earth that Slayyyter’s own personal idols once tilled was already scorched behind her, so what was left to do?
How about a Hail Mary?
Slayyyter’s third full-length LP, Wor$t Girl in America, is a diamond-hard jawbreaker of a pop record, a totally self-immolating blaze of glory, a final roar before extinction. Across its 42 minutes, she rages against the machine and embraces it in equal measure. It’s some real master’s-house-master’s-tools shit. It’s like watching someone eat their last meal.
Half of the album’s success can be attributed purely to volume. Like Sleigh Bells‘ Treats and M.I.A.’s MAYA before it, Wor$t Girl in America boasts dangerous horsepower, blown into the red and stuffed to the point of bursting with sound. The crown jewel “Crank” is loud as hell, a room-shaking blend of electroclash, Jersey Club and industrial rap that marries her winking humor with her bass addiction.
Sister track “Yes Goddd” takes it further with a bridge lifted straight from The Money Store, a talk-rapped monologue like a declaration of war before launching into a screaming freakout and breathless Justice-inspired breakdown. Unlike anywhere else in her catalogue, Slayyyter is ecstatic, overflowing with charisma and command.
The masculine, muscular edge of the wrathful bangers slices through her bubblegum past like a chainsaw, a godsend for her image, moving her out of the queer sort of “slay” into the metalhead variety. Jagged cuts like “Beat Up Chanel$” are so virtuosic they almost seem obvious. Pop music had been so overdue for a butching-up that it’s baffling nobody else thought to do so sooner. There’s honest-to-god heterosexual club potential in these songs, capitalizing on indie-sleaze nostalgia but dodging trendfucking through her kaleidoscopic approach to songcraft.
Bangers like these wouldn’t be enough, though. Slayyyter’s longtime supporters already knew she was capable of caustic party music, and these tracks feel like natural continuations of the strongest points on Troubled Paradise and Starfucker. Where she surprises, and really earns the album’s transcendent quality, is in its softer moments.
On past releases, ballads were ill-fitting alongside Slayyyter’s confrontational, horned-up aesthetic; too earnest or chintzy to hold their own in the same collection of songs as filthy and outrageous as “Purrr” or “Venom”. In the moments on “Wor$t Girl” when the BPM drops, her star qualities remain front and centre, cracking a code that’s eluded her up to this point in her career.
“Unknown Loverz” falls somewhere between No Doubt and Passion Pit, her voice lilting and teasing, but full and arresting. Where she once hid behind Auto-Tune or jokey irony, she discovers a lovely and moving soft register full of longing and disillusionment. Closer “Brittany Murphy” keeps the robotic delivery but ditches the guardedness, dropping all of the album’s prior bravado to lay her anxieties bare: “Is my face too disgusting for open casket? / Do you notice all I’ve done?”
Shreds of this realized potential are scattered throughout Slayyyter’s discography. Still, in the shadow of this album, her past work feels like a pose, easter eggs of her true taste nestled in music too nervous to dissent from the party line. On Troubled Paradise, she led with the red herring “Self Destruct”, a shrieking piece of noise rap before a record full of mostly palatable dance music. In “Starfucker”, her sense of nightclub hedonism was more sinister than that of her contemporaries, name-dropping party drugs and invoking brooding dark-wave dance over typical crowd-pleasers. However, the album still drew comparisons to Ava Max‘s utterly inoffensive stylings.
There’s no such compromise on Slayyyter’s Wor$t Girl in America. It’s not wall-to-wall original; it shares more than a little DNA with Kesha‘s magnum opus Animal, and Gwen Stefani‘s kitchen-sink pop record Love.Angel.Music.Baby. Still, for as referential as it is, it’s more than the sum of its parts through genuine, intimate love for the music that inspired it. It’s a collage of magazine clippings cherished to shreds by its maker, curated so lovingly that it’s like sneaking a look inside a diary.
It’s a miraculous album because it rises above pop star rules through an infectious collapse of ego. It’s ugly, gritty, tense, and uninspirational – everything that a pop star isn’t. It’s the sound of a true hunger, a last-ditch effort with real stakes. It strips away all the supposedly requisite dress-up and leaves no question: there was a star under there.