A Night Out with Slayyyter

Slayyyter has a confession to make. “It’s a funny thing, and people might be shocked: I really hate the club,” she says. It’s 10 on a Friday night — or the Friday night, the release day of her third studio album, Wor$t Girl in America — and we are just settling in at Old Flings, a dimly lit cocktail bar on Avenue A. The singer arrived running on Celsius and natural adrenaline. She chose this particular bar for a reason: “Old Flings” is also the title of a song on Wor$t Girl, and it’s about her ex who works here. (He wasn’t in the building this night.) The typically unsparing lyrics — “That sh*tty poetry only made you the pick-me type” — suggest that might be for the best.

Even though her ex wasn’t on the clock, Slayyyter knows the doorman, who gives us a free bottle of tequila. When it arrives at the table, she laughs at the absurdity. “There’s something funny about paying for a bottle and then having to make your own drink,” she says. “I’ve always found that so wack. Like, bring me a f*cking cocktail. I feel like I’m at a basement party with cranberry juice and no ice.” Her in-person presence is a foil to the grimy sound she’s perfected. For someone who just released the loudest record of the year so far, she’s disarmingly sweet to everyone, whether to friends popping by to congratulate her or the bartender, who brings us orange juice and soda as mixers. She usually isn’t one to drink much, she says, but the postpartum feeling of releasing her baby into the world made her feel “nervy” all day. And as she now infamously screams in “Crank,” there’s really no choice but to “get gay off that tequila.” We clink our glasses to the “worst girl in America” and settle in for a proper debrief.

A child of the Internet (and specifically Tumblr) born in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Slayyyter grew up listening to the usual 2000s pop-girl North Stars — Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, One Direction — but also indie rock, electronic music, punk, powerviolence and “random things my skater friends would show me.” Her foray into making music started with electronic-infused trap-pop that leaned into titillating lyrics over bouncing bass. Her penchant for club bangers (despite preferring a dive bar) is led by her twisted pen, which serves her gay fan base handily. “Daddy AF” and “Purrr” proved horny was always going to be in for Slayyyter. (In “Daddy AF”: “He wanna get in my guts / Lickin’ my cl*t till I nut, daddy as f*ck.”) It worked — to a point. After a few more projects, one of which she tells me is “f*cking horrible,” and floating over dance-pop tracks on her Hollywood-obsessed album Starf*cker, she was burn out. “Going into [Wor$t Girl in America], I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to make dance pop,’” she says. “I was very anti-club music.”

If Starf*cker was all silky finishes and pop perfection, Wor$t Girl in America is the complete antithesis. “I wanted it to feel punk, raw, and something that a band could play. I wanted something that felt cool to me that I’d be proud to leave behind,” she says. Her ethos for the record was making “iPod music”; spending time with the album in headphones brought back my own memories of the early 2010s, when Crystal Castles, Justice, Goldfrapp, and other artists turned the volume up to 11 with blaring synths piled on more blaring synths. But don’t put her neatly in a box just because the lens of her camera has a little dirt on it. “I hate the word[s] ‘indie sleaze,’ and I hate microtrend, resurgence sh*t,” she says. “There's a trashiness to what I do always, but people are too on the nose these days with Internet scenes and aesthetics. They want to put blanket terms on it. They think I fit an Internet microtrend, but no. Everyone’s already being fed that. You really have to do your own sh*t.”

A new partnership with Records and Columbia allowed her to do, frankly, whatever the f*ck she wanted. “I didn’t want to make music being like, ‘Oh, this will be a hit.’ I didn’t even want the mixing to be too glossy or too perfect,” she says. Her instincts were right — and reflect a growing trend in the industry where turning inward (for Slayyyter, that was going back to her Midwest-girl roots) and focusing on vulnerability, truth, and a singular sound attracts more fans than engineering a TiKTok song for the masses. I bring up the inevitable comparisons to Brat circling the Internet, and she gives me a knowing smile: “Oh, I saw them.” While the two records are not sonically related, the “Hail Mary” similarities are unavoidable, as are their “I-don’t-give-a-f*ck-anymore” POVs that have grabbed audiences by their heads and shook them around.

Yes, there are a lot of electroclash-laden Justice and SebastiAn homages on the record, like “Yes Goddd” and “$t. Loser” — the latter of which is the best display of her vocal prowess on the record — but her heart is on her tattered plaid sleeve for a good chunk of the songs. “Cannibalism!” is a studious punk-pop record that she says pays homage to The Cramps. “We had made a couple of songs in this iPod-music universe, and then they pulled some drum loops,” she recalls. “It didn’t feel like everything else, and I was like, ‘Wait, I love this.’ That’s my favorite song on the album. I would love to lean more into that sound in future projects. It has a psychobilly, punk influence to it that sounds cool to me.”

In the chorus, sailing over the slick guitars and irresistible drums, she’s not afraid to ask — nay, plead — for what she wants: “Tell you I’m needin’ it, if I don’t have you, I’ll die / Please God, send me a sign.” “Unknown Loverz” feels like a Crystal Castles B-side meant for crying to late at night after your crush ignores you at the school dance (“‘It’s love, it’s love, it’s love’ I say to myself when he doesn't pick up / ‘It’s love, it’s love, it’s love’ / The more that I chase him, the faster he runs”) while “Brittany Murphy” is Slayyyter’s rose-colored-lens pontification on what her legacy will be. It nails the final-track wind-down without totally bumming you out.

After she honed in on the sound, it was time for the visuals. She tells me that after making every song, she knew exactly what the videos would look like. Like the opening sequence of the “Dance…” — she pictured herself walking into her house with her dad yelling at her, and 54 seconds into the song, when the beat drops, shooting him through her closed bedroom door. In true Midwest-girl-on-a-shoestring-budget form, she traveled around the country with her best friend, Kaitlyn Munro, to shoot the entirety of the album’s visuals. Despite the major-label backing, the duo spent virtually no money filming. Every video was directed by Slayyyter and shot by Munro.

“Kait and I were shooting on the fly so much. We ran to the beach on Fourth of July to get free fireworks. We did it again on New Year’s. We went to Texas on tour with Kesha, and we shot in Marfa at the Prada thing,” she says. “We were using what was around but also what fit the album.” The result is decidedly lo-fi, raw, and intimate, matching the sonic atmosphere of the record to perfection. The visual for “Gas Station” is all Slayyyter, twirling in front of the Prada Marfa installation, chilling in a dive-bar bathroom, and looking sexy as hell in a corset and American-flag shorts.

A note about her fashion: When we meet at Old Flings, she’s wearing a tight-fitting leather jacket, indigo skinny jeans with one leg tucked into her fringed suede boots (“It’s the boot French tuck”), a double-headed fox stole she bought on Poshmark (“I’m a Poshmark addict”), and an old Chanel bag (“a beat-up Chanel, if you will,” she says with a wink). She’s a clear fashion lover, but for this album cycle, she skipped the stylist. “There’s so many amazing stylists I’ve worked with, and there are stylists who bring an artistic quality to a project that is crucial, but it’s not always called for every aesthetic. This music did not warrant anything that’s hard to get your hands on. I wanted everything to feel like it was pulled off my bedroom floor.”

The vibe she was going for harkens back to the mid-aughts, when stars like Chloë Sevigny would style themselves, or when Lana Del Rey wore Topshop in music videos. For the “Cannibalism!” visual, she hand-embroidered a bra with beaded fringe that caught the light beautifully as she shimmied and slinked in the video. The “rat race” for archival pulls, she tells me, has lost its sparkle for her. “I'm really over high-fashion editorial. Even if it’s an insane pull, it feels devoid of meaning... What does it mean to the music?”

Slayyyter leaned into the sleazy Midwest girl she’s always been in tight corsets, butt-skimming shorts (she didn’t even steam the denim pair on the album cover), and — her one true weakness — sickening shoes. “The fashion is almost the least important thing,” she says. “I’ve been wanting to make my own costumes. It makes me feel like I’m in high school, when I would make my own Tumblr shirts and Kylie Jenner studded shorts because they were $200. It gave it a charm it’s meant to have. Styling myself has allowed me to fully have control. It doesn’t have to be like, ‘You can’t just wear, like, jean shorts,’ and I’m like, ‘But I can.’” Her “merch” (she prefers to call them drops) includes a trucker hat with an $100 bill on it (they’re sold out, but she wants to do another run and make them $1 each); her dollar-sign logo stamped onto T-shirts; and a pair of pre-muddied boots inspired by Kate Moss at Glastonbury and her hometown in Missouri.

The intentionality behind every move might not be apparent at first glance, but like the creepy bunny in the “Cannibalism!” and “Crank” music videos, everything has a meaning. “It’s meant to be the worst parts of yourself being right behind you. Bunnies are such an innocent thing, and it’s the contrast of something so sweet, but he’s perverted and creepy,” she explains. The bunny isn’t just symbolism, either — her childhood home was covered in bunny figurines that her mom collected. The worst girl in America isn’t interested in being fake anymore: “There’s a lot that is very true to my life story that I didn’t want to paint in such an obvious way. It’s all very coded because I get shy about my life and things that have happened to me. Everything has a deeper meaning to it. There’s nothing that’s a random visual.”

Her looks on the single covers and in the music videos are already being recreated by fans and drag queens, who were out in full force at her album release party thrown by Luis Fernando’s World, our next stop of the night. When we arrive at 3 Dollar Bill, we make a beeline for the greenroom; Slayyyter cracks open another Celsius and water. If the energy of the album is feral, the gays and theys that congregated for her were downright ferocious. Her team hatches a plan for her to step out, hand out a few beers and tequila (to stay gay off of it, naturally), and say hello to her fans with her dollar-sign-logo-emblazoned bullhorn.

After composing herself, Slayyyter and her posse approach the crowd and thank everyone for being there. With one final “crank it!,” she descends into the audience. It’s instant mayhem; security attempts to escort her to the bar, as she stops for countless selfies. Circling back to VIP, she poses with her legion of drag-queen stans for even more selfies and watches with glee as someone dressed in a bunny costume menaces onstage. Finally, she asks the DJs to throw on “Crank” for one last dance. She gives the now-signature Slayyyter swerve by shoving her shoulders forward aggressively one at a time, then throws her hands up, her head back, and releases a “crank it!” so guttural and joyous, you just know teenage Slayyyter, iPod in hand, would be proud.