Before Slayyyter became the Wor$t Girl in America in 2026, she was just a typical kid named Catherine Grace Garner who grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis surrounded by bunnies.
They weren’t the cute, furry kind that kids love to cuddle, but rather 400 sterile porcelain figures, decorated ceramic plates, Easter-centric needlepoint towels, and lifeless statues with big ears and immovable cottontail puffs that her mom collected and littered throughout the home.
“I feel like when you get to a certain age as a woman, you pick an animal that becomes your house motif, and hers is definitely a bunny rabbit,” Garner jokes as she hops on our call from her now-adopted hometown of Los Angeles to talk about the making of her new album, including just what in the Donnie Darko is going on in the music videos she has been releasing the past few months.
Punchy electro-noise singles like “Old Technology,” “Crank,” and “Cannibalism!” are given Lynchian interpretations, all tied together by the presence of a deranged, life-size voyeur bunny who watches as Slayyyter tortures and slays men, fires off shotguns at imposing father figures, and films snuff videos as she wears a pair of Playboy-style ears. It’s so diabolical, that “worst girl” doesn’t seem severe enough.
But as she talks about the nightmare-inducing bunny hutch she grew up in and how it all relates back to this album—which at its core is about going home again as a means of self-discovery—it starts to make sense.
The videos represent “a bit of a symbolic fever dream for me, but a dream where I’m remembering something being very wrong,” Garner says, adding, “There’s a lot of symbolism of things from my childhood. This album is really about how you can’t get away from where you came from, even if you try. Things will follow you for the rest of your life. Things that hurt you or things that have harmed you. It sounds so dark, but it’s been my whole thesis every time I make a project.”
Since the launch of Slayyyter in 2018 with her Y2K dance-pop debut “BFF” (and even before), Garner has been trying to get out of Dodge. The blonde starlet alter ego she birthed into the world with 2021’s Troubled Paradise and continued with 2023’s Starfucker and now the Wor$t Girl is a more or less hyper-realized version of herself—the quintessential small-town girl with dreams of escaping a broken home and making it big.
(Credit: Kait Muro)
“My home life growing up was just so turbulent and very dysfunctional. I came from a very, very dysfunctional family life,” Garner admits. “I always wanted to pack my Barbie suitcase and run away. That was my big plan.”
She imbues some of this turbulence into her latest material like the emotive synth soliloquy “Gas Station,” inspired by the time her estranged father left her alone at one when she was just a kid. Even now, you can feel her pain as she sings lyrics about crying her eyes out of desperation.
Another revealing track comes in the finale “Brittany Murphy.,” an homage to the late actress who Garner has often identified with. “I loved and adored her so much. I remember she was the first celebrity that I was so gutted and upset about when she died because I loved Clueless and I loved Uptown Girls,” says Garner.
One other thing to know about Slayyyter is that she’s a huge movie fan. If you couldn’t tell by her cinematic videos, her stage name is actually not a riff on Slayer (though she loves them) but rather inspired by Rory Cochrane’s Slater character from Dazed and Confused, which she’s keen to remind people about on this album cycle. Her song “Crank” sneaks in an “alright, alright, alright” and a reference to director Richard Linklater in the lyrics. “Even though it’s set in the 1970s, it really reminds me of my own high school years and the stoner boys I would hang around with,” she adds. “I feel like this whole album has very Dazed and Confused vibes, but in the new millennium.”
When it comes to Murphy, though, there’s something deeper than a character for Garner. “When I watched the Brittany Murphy docu series [What Happened, Brittany Murphy?], it really struck a chord with me, the pieces of her story, like the broken relationship with her father or how Hollywood treated her and got in her head about her self-perception,” says Garner. “I wanted the song title to be an homage, but it’s more of a song about myself and my own kind of depression and struggles with life.”
(Credit: Kait Muro)
At 29 years of age, it seems that Garner has finally found the way out and created the life she long craved to have. After innocently coming up in the scene by posting songs on Soundcloud, Slayyyter finally signed to a major label last year. Wor$t Girl in America is her third album but her first for Columbia Records’ imprint Records. It’s also the strongest of her career, a tour de force that combines her electro-pop power with some heavier, angrier noise and distortion that comes off like the perfect soundtrack for screaming into the void and then violently shaking it off.
The accompanying tour is also completely sold-out, and in April, another marquee moment will happen as Garner makes her Coachella debut (followed by Governor’s Ball and Lollapalooza this summer) where she will bring along a full band for the first time. After years of paying her dues on tours with Tove Lo, Kesha, and Charli XCX, it only seems right that she sarcastically gloats about getting a taste of the high life in songs like “I’m Actually Kinda Famous” and “Beat Up Chanel$” where she rattles off her wish list of “money, drugs, chains on my chest, that vintage Celine, diamond grills, champagne bottles, swagger I bleed.”
It took years to get to this point though, and Garner was *this close* to giving it all up, especially after Starfucker failed to move the needle in a significant way. For years she had pumped her own money into her career, nearly going broke. While she had some viral success early on with her remix of Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” and the lusty track “Daddy AF” that was picked up on gaydar and boosted with a placement in the Oscar-winning movie Anora, every album cycle had a failure to launch and continued to pin her as a promising “up-and-comer” without giving her credit for actually arriving.
Despondent and broken, Garner felt like maybe it was all for naught, believing she should give up on music and finish her degree she had started at Mizzou years ago, before she dropped out to pursue being a pop star.
(Credit: Kait Muro)
“It was a very expensive mistake where I got into a bunch of debt basically fucking off,” she recalls of her first try at higher education. As she stopped going to classes, she started working at a hair salon and as a waitress, using her paychecks to buy beats from producers and stash bags of rhinestones that she would use to make her own clothing for low-budget videos, emulating the style of her personal icons like Gaga during her Fame Monster phase and Kesha’s Animal era.
“My dream night is rhinestoning things on my couch,” Garner says laughing. She vows to stay true to that DIY spirit even as major label access gets handed to her. “I have to be in the weeds on everything,” she shares. “You could give me $10 million and I would still want to make things myself and do it myself.”
A full circle moment came last summer as Slayyyter was tapped as the support act on Kesha’s Tits Out Tour, which couldn’t have come at a better time for gaining some perspective. Each night, Garner was able to witness another woman artist who was put through hell during the Dr. Luke trials go out on stage to reintroduce herself and reclaim her worth.
“Her show was so inspiring and it would make me very emotional because I feel like as a woman in music, you have such a power and you have such a presence and you matter so much to people. But at the same time, you can just get kind of thrown through the wringer or people will try to knock you down and it’s awful,” says Garner. “Seeing her take back the power and have a show that was so celebratory of her music and her freedom, it was a really cool thing to see. And it made me feel very empowered.”
(Credit: Kait Muro)
Around that time, Slayyyter made a decision: Instead of giving up, she was motivated to push forward—and doing so meant going back to her Midwest roots to rediscover why she loved making music in the first place.
That journey bleeds through on Wor$t Girl In America. While the aforementioned visuals are an obvious play on the doldrums of small-town life that she circumvented—the hunting and baseball games, the boring suburbs and escapist strip clubs, cringey pageants and cheap PBRs, RVs and fireworks—the music more directly harkens back to the sounds she pored over in her childhood bedroom that influenced everything that came after.
“I would spend hours curating music on my iPod, just sitting in my room and closing the door and listening to music to get away from the outside world. From a very early age, music became such an escape,” she explains.
Beyond just a tough home life, Garner also struggled at school where she was admittedly the weird, chubby, awkward kid trying to fit in. “I feel like when someone is not cool at school, they become chronically online, and that is definitely my story,” she says, laughing. “I spent so much time on the computer. I was always on the internet. I was always on iTunes looking at new releases, or other different pockets like Tumblr, Myspace, Twitter. I would comb the internet and would make it my mission to find a cool band that no one knew at school so I could feel cool. I would be like, ‘I have the Gaga album and Kid Cudi and I listen to Gossip. You don’t know what that is. And Vampire Weekend, you don’t know what that is.’ I was just so annoying and insufferable.”
(Credit: Kait Muro)
With Wor$t Girl, the Y2K queen is back in her self-proclaimed “iPod music” era— and proud of it. “I bought a ton of iPods like a year or so ago, when I very first started this album and everything was so cheap, and now the prices are skyrocketing,” she says, clearly also proud of the people adopting the throwback trend with her. “It almost feels like vinyl, where everything is so accessible that people are gravitating towards listening to music on an iPod again, which may seem really inconvenient, but it’s the charm of curating it yourself.”
She explores this theme on the quick hit “Old Technology,” which espouses the merits of going analog as a way to be real again. “I think that with how advanced everything is getting and with AI and people editing their photos, I am excited for a realness and a rawness that cannot be faked by a computer coming into fashion,” she says. “I see it a lot. I feel like people are down to put photos out that maybe don’t look like the most perfectly perfect best. And I think that’s a very healthy thing that needs to happen because it’s been such an airbrushed, robot, no pores on the skin vibes for so long. We need to put our real selves out there again.”
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
