$LAYYYTER: RECLAIMING HER MIDWEST FEVER DREAM

Tomás Mier
Apr 3
7 min read

Updated: Apr 24

Slayyyter Returns to Music with "Wor$t Girl in America," an Ode to Her St. Louis Roots and Her First Album with RECORDS / Columbia Records

Taken from VALŪS Issue 003 Spring 2026 glossy print edition - order your copies today!

Story by Tomás Mier

Catherine Grace Garner, the St. Louis girl known to the world as Slayyyter, was ready to start making this Spring’s Wor$t Girl in America because it was looking like the end of her music journey if she didn’t.

The reality was, Slayyyter’s Starfucker era wasn’t delivering the way she had expected it to. Starfucker, her second studio album which debuted in 2023, was an '80s-influenced electronic pop record with a satirical view of Hollywood, focusing on party culture and the dark side of celebrity. True, her devoted fans were obsessed with Starfucker. Tracks like “I Love Hollywood,” “Miss Belladona” and “Erotic Electronic" were played regularly in gay clubs and underground raves. But inside the machine, Slayyyter felt her gears grinding too hard. She was playing rooms that weren't selling out, and she felt disconnected from her artistic spark, and stuck creatively. By 2024, in many ways, Slayyyter was at her lowest emotional point. And with the impending conclusion of her record deal, she had yet to find a massive hit to break her through into the mainstream in the way she had always envisioned. She remained an icon in the niches of LGBTQ+ and digital spaces—but stuck in an in-between of devoted audiences yet without the success she had pictured.

On Slayyyter | Hat by STETSON, top by ALISA DUDAJ, skirt and shoes by JEFFREY CAMPBELL, jewelry by LANORE FINE JEWELRY, shades by AWD EYEWEAR, belt is Vintage

On Samuel and Gray | Full looks by HEAD OF STATE, shades by AWD EYEWEAR

“I had a weird period of feeling like a failure with that whole project,” she confesses to VALŪS. “I spent so much time trying to fit into this popstar cookie-cutter box that I don’t think is really me. I was really depressed at a certain point. I was letting alcohol take over my life, I was too drunk at the party, and felt like no one gave a fuck about me. It’s so much work and I was trying so hard, I just got to a point where I felt like, this whole music thing, I just wasn’t cut out for.”

So, in 2024, Slayyyter decided her next album—what eventually became Wor$t Girl in America—would be her last, a final attempt at making something that truly felt like her before walking away entirely.

“I just felt very stuck in the sand,” Slayyyter says. “I said, ‘I'm going to go in every day and make music where it's like, if I died tomorrow, I would be proud of leaving this behind.’ I am just going to make one last album and then I'm going to move back to St. Louis with my mom and figure out another job, just because I was so over it.”

Coat by ANN DEMEULEMEESTER, corset by JEFFREY CAMPBELL, jewelry by LANORE FINE JEWELRY

But something inside Slayyyter shifted as she started to dive deep into her Missouri roots, rediscovering the kind of art she actually wanted to create—not the version of it she thought the industry expected from her. She approached Wor$t Girl in America by leaning into the unapologetic, mundane Midwest life of her youth, but in a fever-dream way. The album she eventually delivered is raunchy, sexy, loud, and completely devoid of the polish that she tried to find across Starfucker. Slayyyter is reclaiming the darkness of her early life and the, in her words, “trashiness” that has long been projected onto her and the spaces she grew up in.

More than anything, Wor$t Girl in America is the first time Slayyyter has sounded like her real self, taking inspiration from David Lynch’s film “Inland Empire” and Harmony Korine’s film “Gummo”—both of which find beauty in dirty discomfort. There’s a layer of anxiety that runs as a throughline across Wor$t Girl, mirroring what she was experiencing in real life: the comedown after the chaos of alcohol-fueled nights.

“There are so many references to things that only I know that it's like something from my childhood,” she says, pointing to a dance recital costume she recreated, props from her actual house back home, and the straight boys back home who hold up fish in their Tinder profiles. “It’s a funny play on what I saw growing up, like a fantasy scope of the Midwest culture I grew up around.”

Dress by MAISON MARGIELA, belt is vintage, boots are vintage courtesy of Shanice Archive

In the past, Slayyyter tended to embody exaggerated archetypes: characters that felt aspirational but distant. On her debut mixtape Slayyyter, she sang from the perspective of an idealized celebrity embracing the night life of Los Angeles. Then on Starfucker, she leaned fully into an idealized Old Hollywood glamazonian.

“Being from a small suburb of St. Louis, from a very young age I felt like I just wanted to kind of claw my way out to somewhere else,” she tells us. “The media I would consume when I was young was always based around major cities, whether it was ‘Gossip Girl’ or ‘The O.C.’ or ‘The Hills.’ I would dream of escaping from my reality… being from a very, very dysfunctional household, I just wanted to get out and move away. My musical beginnings all come from wanting to be somewhere else. I would write songs about Hollywood and celebrities when I didn't really even know what that meant and had never even been there before.”

These days, “if something's not 100% I don't go through with it,” Slayyyter says. “It was a weird age where I felt the need to please other people. But I don’t do that anymore.”

Now, her approach takes little consideration of others’ perception. She made Wor$t Girl without chasing a hit per se and without outside songwriters—just following her own taste and instincts, and working solely alongside producers she admires. Slayyyter describes the energy of the album as “great iPod music,” reminiscent of 2010s indie-rock.

“This has more teeth to it: more heavy guitar, crunchier mixing, and it feels very true to my personality,” she says. “I feel like no two songs are exactly alike, but everything fits together very well. It all feels right together, and it feels like a sound that I feel I haven’t heard from anyone. It feels like a good snapshot of where I’m at in life.”

It’s this lack of a filter that allows the album’s 14 tracks to function as a raw patchwork of Slayyyter’s tastes: rap verses, vocal textures, pure pop songs, and a repeated, visceral screaming, all colliding into something that feels cohesive instead of performative. As the album unfolds, Slayyyter reveals a lingering insecurity about her place in the world. The album intentionally opens with the more over-stimulating tracks, including “Dance…” and “Crank” which became instant fan favorites.

"I don't really think anyone else could make a song like 'Crank' or have those liners. It's just like it's funny little shit that I would say or tweet,” Slayyyter opines. “People are responding to it more because it’s coming from a place that is real to me and not me trying to sell something that I'm not.”

Then there’s the softer “Unknown Loverz” on the second half Wor$t Girl that lands as a sort of resting point for the record. "I think that song is like a nice break in between a lot of in-your-face sounds,” she says. “I worked with Chrome Sparks who I was a huge fan of in high school. So it felt very full circle too.”

Slayyyter is particularly proud of “Brittany Murphy,” a track tucked at the tail end of Wor$t Girl. Settled under pop melodies and electric production, Slayyyter writes a goodbye letter in which she tells her fans how she hopes to be remembered. “Tell them I am sorry for / the gun inside my bedroom drawer / this was inevitable / only thought it’d make you love me more,” she sings, later adding, “Say that I am in a better place / when you see my mother's face / please just tell them all I did my best.”

“I wrote that song from a very personal place, but it's still upbeat, and I feel like it's delivered in a way where you almost could miss what I'm saying if you're not listening to the lyrics. I always feel like I’m the corny clown of the music industry or that no one thinks about me at all,” she says. “I think that song is something different for me, and I’m proud that I laid it out like that. It felt uncomfortable to write, which I liked.”

On Samuel and Grey | Full looks by PALOMO SPAIN, shades by AWD EYEWEAR

If Slayyyter started making this album thinking it might be her last, she doesn’t feel that way anymore. Not because everything is suddenly resolved, but because she understands herself better now.

“I think there's something about me personally where I've been emotionally extreme, whether it's extremely happy and inspired or extremely depressed,” she says. “I think that that's something that I will probably tackle for the rest of my life. But I do feel like I'm in a good place now.”

Finally feeling genuinely connected to her art, Slayyyter is ready to deliver a revitalized live experience for her 2026 tour, which kicks off at this year’s Coachella Music and Arts Festival. With a redesigned live set backed by a full band, the goal isn't "crazy sets and theatrics" anymore. Slayyyter wants the stages she graces to feel like "St. Louis basement punk shows.”

“Today, I could not imagine Wor$t Girl in America being my last album ever,” she says, her earlier hopelessness now fully in the rearview. “I have so much more to say, so much more to write and sing about, and so much more inspiration to tap into.”