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It’s 8 a.m. in New York, and Slayyyter is calling me from the makeup chair as she gets ready for this morning’s Area fashion show. Her outfit? A leather jacket and black slip dress with a diamanté-studded pack of Marlboro Golds pinned to her chest. “I’m a rhinestone girl!” she exclaims. “I love the whole fashion show thing—getting dressed up, seeing the clothes, all of it.”
You need only watch her new, self-directed music video for the grungy pop banger “Cannibalism,” released today, to understand why. In one shot, she’s sprawled across the floor in the dressing room of a seedy burlesque club, wearing a ’00s Moschino dress decorated with embroidered dolls, as showgirls and drag performers vamp nearby. In another, she sings in a junkyard wearing a vintage mechanic’s playsuit, reworked with patches lifted from shorts by the cult LA-based designer Brody, and with dollar bills sprouting from the pocket. Finally, we see her take to the stage to deliver her twisted showgirl act, wearing a Bob Mackie-esque hand-beaded and bedazzled two-piece the musician made herself, along with a swan headpiece—also of her own making—inspired by Bob Fosse films.
And that’s without even mentioning her corseted minidress made of garbage bags and worn with Playboy bunny ears: “My mom loved bunnies, so there’s probably 400 bunny plates and statues and figurines and all that all over my house. I feel like it’s almost a weird kind of fever-dream nod to that.” We already know Slayyyter understands how to make brilliant pop music—but the video is a neat reminder that she understands the storytelling power of fashion, too.
Suffice it to say that between New York Fashion Week, an interview, and unveiling the new video, Slayyyter is having a rather busy day. A rather busy year, actually: Over the summer, she criss-crossed the United States while supporting Kesha on her cheekily titled Tits Out Tour. In August, she dropped the video for the debut single, “Beat Up Chanel$,” from her forthcoming (and yet to be formally announced) third album—a raucous slice of crunchy electropop with a chest-thumping chorus, accompanied by a delightfully sleazy video that would have had early ’00s Tumblr in a chokehold. Then, Slayyyter (born Catherine Grace Garner; her pseudonym is inspired by a character from Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused) announced she’d joined Records, a partnership with Columbia Records, signing with a major label after eight years of hard graft in the pop trenches.
“In the meetings [with the label], I’d be like, ‘Listen, I know what my ideas for this project are, and I don’t want to be a pretty choreo pop girl,’” she recalls saying. “‘I think that’s all great, but I think I’m just at a place where I want to do something that’s kind of gross and trashy and the opposite of what I think a pop star is to a lot of people.’ And they were really, really open to it and down for it.”
It’s a long way from Slayyyter’s beginnings in the suburbs of St. Louis, listening to Lady Gaga’s The Fame obsessively on her iPod and recreating (using materials sourced on Etsy) the studded and frayed high-waisted denim shorts she saw on celebrity gossip blogs. “I was just honestly doing it out of being super broke, and wanting to spend my money on cigarettes instead,” she remembers, with a laugh.
After beginning to write and produce her own tunes during the year she spent in college, she started posting them on the internet. Her self-titled debut mixtape—self-released in 2019—quickly attracted attention from pop fans drawn to her anthemic choruses, slick ’00s electropop production, and the no-holds-barred sexuality of her lyrics. When, in 2023, she released her superb second album, Starfucker, she seemed poised, finally, to have her breakout moment—yet despite being one of the best pop records of the year, it didn’t quite make the splash it deserved.
So after wrapping up the tour for Starfucker, Slayyyter went back to the drawing board and began working on the music she’s now rolling out—a vibe she’s nicknamed “iPod music” because of the way it reflects the sounds she was most into as a teenager. “It feels very raw and loud, and I have requested certain songs not to be mixed so perfectly, so there’s a real crunch to it,” she says. That quality is audible on “Cannibalism,” where the starting point was a groovy guitar lick that reminded her of The Cramps—“music that I really like, but I never thought would come through in my own output”—and the finishing touch is the stutter and growl of her vocals, which were inspired in part by Jack White. “I feel like we wrote it and got it together in 45 minutes,” she says, which feels nicely in keeping with its punk-inflected energy. She’s looking forward to performing it on tour with a live band for the first time: “I’m really excited to play all this music live. It’s just going to melt people’s faces.”
Slayyyter can now happily say the upcoming album is the project she’s most proud of, but it also came out of some dark nights of the soul. “I feel like it all started from a place of being like, ‘Fuck this music shit. This is the last album I’ve ever going to make, blah blah blah,’” she says. “In doing that, I started making music I loved so, so much. I was like, ‘Wait, I love doing this! I was just kidding!’”
And while it’s become something of a cliché for pop artists to describe their latest project as their more personal yet, in Slayyyter’s case, it rings true: the process of self-reflection she underwent while making it has left her feeling the happiest and most content she’s been in her career thus far. “When I started all of this music, I didn’t have the intention to be more personal, but I just kind of had a period of time where I felt very introspective about my life and my childhood and my teen years. What an incredible thing to be plucked out of St. Louis as a hair salon receptionist answering the phone, and having music find an audience online.”
“But, you know, it’s been a while,” she continues, after a pause. “I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and haven’t had a mainstream breakthrough moment. And I think that got in my head a lot. But then I was like, ‘You know what? I’ve been afraid to do this or do that. And so I started just being like, ‘I want to make this album that feels like a little bit of everything I love.’”
For an artist whose music is so brash and in-your-face—on “Daddy AF,” which memorably soundtracked a strip club scene in Anora, she sings gleefully about popping bottles before commanding a boy to “put it on your face”; on “Beat Up Chanel$,” she snarls a lyric about wanting “sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed”—it’s a surprise to discover that, in conversation, Slayyyter is thoughtful, softly-spoken, and self-effacing. She talks most enthusiastically, in fact, when shouting out the designers she worked with for her looks in the video, or the performers she cast to dance alongside her. “The girls in the video are all really incredible burlesque performers, and they make their own costumes, so I felt I had to take it upon myself to make my own costume,” she explains. (She recently took up sewing after finding that her hot glue gun pieces could no longer pass muster on camera.) “It took a month, but I love doing stuff like that. I put feathers on the headdress and I get really crafty.”
Essentially, while Slayyyter may have signed to a major label, she’s lost none of her DIY spirit. “I feel like I naturally, and not in an annoying way, have a kind of anti-establishment spirit, where I like doing things myself,” she says. “I reject the whole notion that being a great artist means that you need to have someone do your hair and your makeup and your styling and your everything.”
She goes on: “I think that there used to be something really cool and sexy and mysterious about celebrity culture back in the day, because it wasn’t all so overproduced and over-stylized. There’s something very charming to me about when artists do things themselves. I feel like you could kind of tell.” Thankfully, it feels like the world is ready for exactly that kind of pop star.
