Worst Girl in America: The Rebirth of Slayyyter

Six months ago, Slayyyter thought she might be running out of chances. She was 10 years into a music career that had earned her a devoted following but little financial security, and she regarded her new album, Worst Girl in America, as do-or-die. Then everything changed.

Worst Girl in America would mark an inflection point in the 30-year-old’s career. In the months to come, she’d achieve her highest chart debut, find viral hits in her songs “Dance …” and “Brand New Chanels” and perform game-changing sets at major music festivals like Coachella, Governors Ball and Lollapalooza.

“I haven’t really had time to process much,” Slayyyter says now. It’s been six months since we last spoke, just as she was about to release Worst Girl in America. The self-deprecating title — a term of endearment she and her skater-crowd friends in suburban Missouri would use — is a semi-ironic glimpse into how the singer felt about herself and her place in the music industry at the time.

The stunning success of the album has changed that viewpoint considerably. When she first started, getting 10,000 plays on a song was a major win; “I really felt like a nobody out of nowhere living in St. Louis and making music in my closet,” she says. To put things in perspective, her latest single, “Crank 2,” has garnered over 8 million listens on Spotify in three weeks.

“That people have responded to the music in this way means I can have more creative freedom to make what I want to make,” she adds. “This whole project has just been about that and doing things yourself and in the way you want to do them.”

As Slayyyter tells it, the turning point was her Coachella performance earlier this year. She filled the Mojave tent with about 10,000 fans in the crowd early on Friday, the first day of the festival. That afternoon, Slayyyter took the stage to the opening notes of her viral hit “Dance …,” her curly, blond hair flowing out of a trucker hat and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. She DIY-ed the outfit: a white top, denim shorts with a big belt, an animal pelt on her shoulder and a pack of Marlboro Reds peeking out of her pocket. The cigarettes are certainly a prop for the Midwest party girl aesthetic she’s cultivated, but it doesn’t make it any less authentic — she’s an unabashed smoker and even breaks out her vape mid-interview (which suggests her smoking is at least somewhat abashed). Slayyyter once described her performing persona as “backwoods ballerina” — which, it turns out, is not so much a persona.

The singer saw a massive streaming bump during the second weekend of the festival, with her Spotify plays jumping 380 percent globally, according to the platform.

Onstage, Slayyyter, whose real name is Catherine Grace Garner, is a force, constantly moving around the stage, thrashing her head along to the music and screaming the lyrics to her songs. Offstage, she’s only a bit more subdued. There’s never a time when it feels like you’re talking with either Slayyyter — the pop star — or Grace, the girl who grew up in a St. Louis, Missouri, suburb with no ties to the music industry. It’s always both.

Slayyyter’s family had “no money,” she says, and she never had any backup plan or a financial cushion while pursuing music. At some point, she became fed up with the system. “I was lacking financial security and sinking so much money into tours and into costumes and other things and not really seeing any kind of benefit,” Slayyyter says. It felt “soul-crushing” to put out albums, each time with the hope that the latest release would be the one to give her, and in turn her family, stability.

Her previous album, 2023’s Starfucker, released through the indie Fader Label, was all about Hollywood. It was a parody of celebrity, inspired by her own pilgrimage to Los Angeles. Though hard-core fans were treating her like a star, she was experiencing a more niche version of celebrity, in the form of internet clout. “I feel like I’ve always been in the suburbs of fame, if you will, where I’m not quite all the way there, but I’m not also all the way out in the countryside either,” she says.

For Worst Girl in America, she actively avoided current trends. Instead, she found inspiration in her teenage years. She made most of the album between leaving Fader and signing with Records/Columbia in 2025. If this was to be her last album — which she felt was a real possibility — she’d want it to be for and about people in the flyover states that are all too often ignored by the pop mainstream.

The tour for the album has allowed the singer to reconnect with her roots. On month three, I catch her in a hotel room in Roanoke, Virginia, where she lists the highlights of what she’s seen in the town so far: a Boot Barn, a Michael’s craft store and a Buffalo Wild Wings. “I feel like I’m in St. Louis. Everywhere you go, this is what most of the country looks like,” she says.

“People just see the small town, the visuals that paint a portrait of small towns, and they feel so connected with it because we’ve all been there,” Slayyyter continues, explaining why she thinks her album has resonated with people.

The video for the album’s first single, “Beat Up Chanels,” captures the backwoods-ballerina aesthetic. The singer, almost always dressed in white, is shown among a crowd of guys at a house party, dressed in a floral bodysuit with bunny ears while she smokes a cigarette and lifts weights.

At one point in the video, she looks practically bridal with a white lace veil, as she lights a cigarette and fireworks erupt in the background. Slayyyter evokes the scene she was going for: “Drinking in a parking lot with our friends and kicking at the grass, getting a little dirt on your shoes, and trying to find a place to go smoke weed where you’re not going to get in trouble.”

Worst Girl in America’s sonic profile is equal parts hyperpop, dance and electronic, with a dash of punk. The singer describes the vibe as: music that the coolest girl in school would’ve used as her MySpace or Tumblr song. All signs point to Slayyyter being that cool girl, even though she’s often referred to herself as the girl who wore pajama pants to high school.

Her crowds have increased exponentially this year, doubling from Coachella to the Governors Ball, and doubling again by the time she played Lollapalooza. But while her career was skyrocketing, she was dealing with the end of her relationship with her boyfriend, a producer and musician. “A breakup isn’t the worst thing in the world, but I feel like I was having this personal life shift,” she says. “I had to leave New York out of nowhere because of something unfortunate happening to me during the busiest time of my life.”

Two days before Worst Girl in America dropped, Slayyyter learned that her then-boyfriend had cheated on her in her house while she was away rehearsing for her Coachella debut. “There was something that felt so insane to me about having these career highs, and at these major milestone points, things were just falling apart,” she says. Everyone kept congratulating her on the long overdue success. But, she says, “I just felt so sad and upset and almost unable to enjoy it.”

She channeled her anger into both her Coachella set and, eventually, the track that would cement her ascension into the mainstream, her summer single “Brand New Chanels.” Conceived as an inverse of “Beat Up Chanels,” the song digs into her ex’s infidelity in jarringly specific terms — “Found out that you tried to kill me / Right before my most important day / Tell me why’d you ever bring her / In my home while I was so far away?” It instantly caught fire online.

In contrast to the music video for “Beat Up Chanels” which showed Slayyyter in all white, the “Brand New Chanels” clip featured her in a black lace ensemble, with the same pair of bunny ears she wore at Coachella. “It almost feels like a funeral,” she says. “Everything in my life has inversed and flipped upside down, so it’s just continuing everything from a different perspective.”

She adds, “There’s something hopeful in such a sad song, and I can only ever hope that my music can offer that to people or can help people in any way. I make it as such an expression of my own feelings, but I think that we all go through the same things as human beings.”

“Brand New Chanels” marked the singer’s debut on a mainstream Billboard songs chart, which she entered at No. 98. Given that success, she says that people online have been quick to declare her the winner in this breakup, telling her she’s really shown him. She doesn’t quite see it that way. “You still feel so embarrassed, and you still feel so sad and it doesn’t really change your heart being broken. It’s been nice turning those feelings into music that resonates with people,” she says. “I see people on tour every night crying. I’ve never made music before where I’ve witnessed people crying in the front row.”

Contractually speaking, Slayyyter wasn’t supposed to be putting out new music after Worst Girl in America. “Brand New Chanels” was originally a demo she’d made with producers Austin Corona and Wyatt Bernard during one of their first sessions together in the summer of 2024. (Their collaboration eventually led to the creation of “Beat Up Chanels.”)

The demo that would turn into “Brand New Chanels” had completely different lyrics and a distinct feel. “It was very EDM-y,” Bernard says. In creating the 2026 version, the team stripped away some of the synth for a more organic sound, with the addition of live drums and brash guitars. Bernard and Corona credit Slayyyter’s recent festival gigs and tour for moving things in that direction. When we spoke in March, she was about to play with a live band for the first time, at Coachella, and she was nervous. She told me it felt like starting over.

Despite all her success over the past year, Slayyyter’s still waiting for that one major hit. The one that tops the charts and dominates the airwaves. When it’s suggested that “Brand New Chanels” feels firmly in that territory, she’s dismissive. It may have broken through culturally, she says, but music is a numbers game. “You see the song has done well, but to me, a true hit is something that really makes its way to the top of the charts and stays there for a while,” she says. “Brand New Chanels” spent a week on the Hot 100.

When Slayyyter was making Starfucker, she’d go into sessions feeling like she had to make the kind of big pop song that you’d hear on the radio. Something formulaically engineered. “I don’t even listen to those songs,” she says. With Worst Girl in America and beyond, she wanted to do things differently.

Call it the Slayyyter Paradox: She is yearning for that one massive hit, but has never wanted to be a “big, glossy pop star,” and has resisted pressure from the industry to become just that. “I still don’t consider myself a pop star,” she says. It’s a puzzling admission given she’s been labeled one of pop’s greatest breakthroughs of the year by critics across the industry, including The New York Times.

“I love pop stars, and I’m not even saying that in a way where I think I’m better than that. It’s more that I never felt manicured enough to fit into that,” she says.

Slayyyter’s music has never sounded like it’s gotten its nails done, so to speak. Regardless, she’s convinced that neat, clean pop sound is going out of style. She suggests AI has something to do with it. She argues that AI can easily mimic the kind of “songwritery” pop that can be heard on pop radio or over the speakers of department stores.

She says listeners want something human, which is what she strove to do with Worst Girl in America; so human that sometimes you can’t understand her or the lyrics don’t make grammatical sense.

Earlier this week, she announced what she called Worst Girl in America‘s “brother” album, Worst Man in America, out later this year. It’s a companion piece to her breakthrough album, which she also worked on with Corona and Bernard. It features “Brand New Chanels” and her recently released “Crank 2,” along with seven new songs.

Where Worst Girl in America focused heavily on Slayyyter’s life before her career breakthrough, Worst Man in America is inspired by everything she’s experienced since.

“I didn’t want to just put music on the back burner and promote the album and then tour it and then have that be that,” she says. “I feel like I had more to say.”

It all came together quickly. Bernard suggests that Slayyyter’s newfound confidence in her work helped move the project along, allowing the team to create nine new songs in about three months. They’d have weeks here and there, in between the singer’s multiplying appearances, to lock in and make music. “We also had a lot to write about because she had gone through … some personal stuff and it was like, now we have a story to tell,” Bernard says.

With the year she’s had, Slayyyter seems like a shoo-in for one of the coveted best new artist slots at next year’s Grammy Awards, which reward artists who have just broken into the mainstream no matter how long they’ve been active. It seems odd to refer to her as an overnight sensation, considering she’s been working at this her entire 20s. But that’s, strangely, how Slayyyter herself sees it. “Whether or not I put in the time previously, I’d gotten so comfortable with the underground internet artist space that I occupy, that … it feels overnight for me,” she admits.

The scale is different, the opportunities are different, and it all happened so fast, Slayyyter explains. “I’m glad that I had the years of trying what does and doesn’t work and had touring experience,” she says. “All of that has built me up to be able to handle this and deliver something worthwhile.”

She’s thankful this didn’t happen when she was 22. “I don’t think I was ready for that, and I don’t think I was making anything that would have been compelling enough to really hit off in the way this album has,” Slayyyter says.

The Slayyyter I spoke with in March had an uncertain future ahead, but she was backed by an album she knew was good and genuinely believed in. The Slayyyter I’m speaking with now is firmly in control of her destiny as an artist. Or at least she appears to be, which might be all that matters.

“I’m so not used to this attention or any of this, so if people think I’m an overnight success, I’m almost fine with that,” she says. “I’ve had a rebirth.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.