Slayyyter - World Girl in America Review

A maximalist, club-fuelled reinvention that turns Slayyyter’s internet-born persona into something darker, sharper and far more unpredictable.

There’s something so great about a girl that just always knew she was going to make it. This is the girl we see in the music video for Slayyyter’s ‘DANCE…’, sporting a tiara in a motel lobby, an outfit made entirely of rosettes taking out the trash at a hair salon, killing her layabout father with a shotgun and dancing under a sky of fireworks. As much a visual artist as she is a musician, Slayyyter’s made a music video for every song on her new album, each another delicious fractal of the kaleidoscope that is her powerhouse new record WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA.

Slayyyter was born on the internet - “straight off the Tumblr blog” - in her own words on ‘Old Technology’, self-releasing her first mixtape on SoundCloud in 2019. She achieved Twitter fame with ‘Mine’ in the same year, and was picked up by the industry for two albums - Troubled Paradise in 2021, followed by the synthpop project Starfucker in 2023. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA (or WGIA$ for short) will be her first album on Columbia Records, having signed with the major label in 2025.

For a pop-leaning female musician with a high femme aesthetic, comparisons to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are unsurprising - (she talks about listening to ‘Disney Channel music’ as a kid) but WGIA$ is her biggest departure yet from that self-referential ‘girly’ sound. ‘Dance…’ opens with a dark, industrial electronic riff that sounds more like classic electro bro duo Justice than the pop stars of the early 00s, and the album is certainly her most club-leaning, risk-taking yet.

This opening track, by far one of the album’s best, launches us into the breathless outpouring of the record’s opening act, showcasing Slayyyter’s protean skillset. ‘DANCE…’ is a power-hungry, surging dance track; ‘BEAT UP CHANEL$’ is the most visually evocative and traditionally Slayyyter in tone, hyper, bombastic electropop with the addictive hook “sex money drugs chains on my chest vintage Céline”. Barely pausing for breath, she does grungey rock in ‘CANNIBALISM!’ and raps in ‘CRANK IT’, teetering closer and closer to the edge of something, like a multi-day bender that ends up on the hotel floor. She’s brash, she’s funny, (“he says he want to fuck Slayyyter, Richard we should link later”) she’s multi-talented, and well aware of it. Dialling the BPM ever so slightly up and down, gliding in between genres, it’s like a very well executed club set, held together by unwavering self confidence. As a side note, I’d love to know what 65-year old Before Sunrise director Richard Linklater thinks of his cameo - did that line (which ends: “get to my hotel and suck him off in the elevator”) have to be signed off? Does he even know it exists?? But then Slayyyter is an LA girl now, and by the sounds of it, keeping some pretty star-studded company. 

The figure of the Worst Girl in America is something of a double entendre - raised in a small town near St. Louis, Missouri, Slayyyter now lives and works in LA, a twin identity that the album picks apart. She brings to life both the life of the Californian party girl - “Oh, she knows the DJ….”, she drawls on the deliciously scornful and self-explanatorily titled ‘I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS’, and the teenager sneaking out to party in the mid-west, and it’s her metamorphosis from Missouri kid to pop princess that provides the album’s narrative material. 

She’s collaborated with a serious roster of female talent: Ke$ha, Ayesha Erotica, Pussy Riot, and many more - but this album is pure Slayyyter. It takes place somewhere between diary entry and wish fulfillment: when she sings “I wanna dye my hair every pretty shade of pastel”, on ‘BEAT UP CHANEL$’, we hear both St. Louis teenage Slayyyter and Slayyyter the star, a dream and its realisation colliding in a beguiling rush of gaudy images and sound.

At its midway point, the album tears back in time with ‘GAS STATION’ - the relentless tempo drops for the first time and Slayyyter explores a different self. Over a synthpop sound oozing with early 2000s nostalgia, we find her abandoned at a gas station by a loved one, alone and small under a vast expanse of night sky. The dark industrial current briefly regains control on ‘YES GODDD’, but on ‘OLD FLING$’ the club-leaning electro-clash sound falls away - “it’s love, it’s love, it’s love”, she trills over a fluttery, dance pop melody, remembering “his name carved with a heart in my underwear drawer”. While these moments of respite are necessary for survival of the album as a whole, the more forgettable tracks are these softer, more synthy, poppier ones - she begins to revv back up by re-invoking the money drugs chains on my chest hook in ‘ST LO$ER’, but the second half of the album lacks the impetus of the first. 

‘WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE LIKED’ feels like an accidental insertion from the Addison Rae catalogue, reaching for the themes of fame and attention worn thin by repetition in mainstream pop at the minute, but ‘PRAYER’ and ‘BRITTANY MURPHY’, both ushering in themes of religion, fallen starlets, and the morbid imagining of her own death, work well as final puzzle pieces to a singular, complex and glorious piece of art.