What’s striking about WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA isn’t just how it sounds, but how meticulously it looks – a world that Slayyyter began assembling long before the songs cohered. By Spring 2024, she made a deliberate swerve away from anything that felt too “of the moment.” “I got back on Tumblr and was staying away from anything too micro-trendy… I started, like, buying Supreme again and getting really into specific fashion pieces,” she says. The album’s visual language – equal parts Midwest decay and branded indulgence – follows suit. She tells me about a scarf from a collaboration between illustrator Aurel Schmidt and Supreme, littered with cigarette butts and debris but rendered with almost perverse luxury. Tied around the straps of a beat-up Chanel bag, it became a kind of visual doctrine. “I would look at that scarf on the purse and literally think, ‘This is the music I want to make.’” It’s an image that aptly captures the album’s tendency to make ugliness aspirational, a scrappy mythos that extends into the project’s 14 accompanying visuals, each track paired with its own vignette of American excess and ruin.

For all its aesthetic precision, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA rejects the safety of a fixed persona – Slayyyter is still fully visible inside it, just pushed past the point of legibility. “I feel like this is my first project where I’m not really playing a character at all. Like, I am this person, I am this girl,” she says, flattening the distance between performer and subject in a way that feels almost confrontational. The album’s voice moves in the same vein, diaristic and hyper-stylized, brash enough to feel scripted until you realize that it isn’t. “The lyrics are how I speak, the lingo is how I talk, everything feels very in line with me and who I am.” She laughs when describing the emotional logic underpinning it: “There’s something about that feeling as a teenage girl where you just want to fit in, so you smoke the dab even though you know you’re gonna get a panic attack because you want to impress these guys, or whatever.” It’s a throwaway memory that sticks, less about the act itself than the slightly humiliating calculus of wanting to be seen, even at your own expense.

After years of perfecting her craft under the weight of expectation, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA finally finds Slayyyter letting herself off the leash. “With this album, I threw expectation out the window,” she says, reflecting on the difference from her previous releases. “With Starfucker, I wanted to make music that sounded expensive and glossy and as perfect as possible… With this album, I was like, ‘I wanna like it, I wanna think that this is cool,’” a mindset that, ironically, pushed her into making something sharper, stranger, and, in her words, better. “I’ve always felt a little bit misunderstood. So if people misinterpret this project, I feel like that fulfills the prophecy.”