According to a recent interview in The Fader, Slayyyter is tired of being labeled an “up-and-comer,” so she threw caution to the wind for Wor$t Girl in America. Her third studio album channels all of her wildest impulses, but its clamorous highs and thrumming lows are meted out with care and precision. It’s ironic that this abrasive kiss-off to anyone still sleeping on her is poised to be the singer’s most commercially successful release to date. “Baby, this is do or die,” indeed.
That literal ultimatum—from the blood-soaked “Cannibalism!”—captures the indelible spirit of hysteria and hyperbole coursing through Slayyyter’s best songs. When the bratty “Beat Up Chanel$” earned her a deal with Columbia Records last year, Slayyyter savvily wielded her new resources for a lavish mood board of grit and grime. The album’s surreal, self-directed music videos are replete with dead animals, baseball bats, drugs, dungeons, and iPods. A man in a bunny suit is never far from the blitzed bombshell, chaperoning the singer on her descent down the proverbial rabbit hole. The video for “Dance…” suggests a demented flip side to Oz, a netherworld of all-American danger and depravity, brutish and beguiling in equal measure.
The symbolism goes a long way toward creating a cohesive aesthetic for an album that, in contrast to 2023’s Starfucker, is more of a sonic achievement than a thematic one. Lyrically, Wor$t Girl in America is more of a conceptual riff on the up(per)s and down(er)s of acting out than the statement of intent suggested by its virtuosic production. Above all else, the album’s pleasures derive from hearing Slayyyter find a sound that’s unmistakably hers.
Throughout the symphony of reverb in “Crank,” the punchy squalls of “Old Technology,” and the swelling cacophony of “Yes Goddd” and “I’m Actually Kinda Famous,” Slayyyter’s vocal range and verbal wit pierce through the noise. “He wanna fuck Slayyyter/Richard we should link-later/Get to my hotel and suck him off in the elevator/Saint Laurent jacket on the ground/Moneymaker” is just one of an abundance of punny, raucous rhymes scattered across the album. The sum of these adrenaline-fueled parts is the kind of music that the vampires in Blade might listen to before Wesley Snipes shows up to chop them to pieces.
Such feral, pummeling peaks are, necessarily, tempered with the chiller beats and dreamier synths of tracks like “Gas Station” and “Unknown Loverz,” which serve to steady your pulse between bouts of head-banging. The album concludes somewhere in between those two modes, with a pair of songs—“What Is It Like, to Be Liked?” and “Brittany Murphy”—that leave less of an impression, but it’s not for any slump in lyrical caliber. Wor$t Girl in America experiences the kind of comedown that’s expected after so much turbulence. It’s an album packed with exertions that’s sure to leave you breathless.
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