S layyyter used to buy into the idea of luxury as a symbol of status and style. Just a few years ago, she believed it enough to run up a credit-card charge for a designer purse straight from the retailer, even though she knew she couldn’t afford it. “It fell apart within, like, a month,” Slayyyter says, lounging on a couch in New York.

The 29-year-old has arrived at Rolling Stone’s office in distressed cutoff denim shorts and custom boots self-designed to look like she’s been trekking through sludge à la Kate Moss at Glastonbury 2005. This is more of Slayyyter’s vibe these days: She’s embracing being a bit rough around the edges, wearing her hair however it dries, sourcing her wardrobe from vintage shops and creating whatever she can’t find there herself. It’s all in the spirit of Wor$t Girl in America, her third studio album, released this spring.

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Watch the video interview below

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“I never fit the box of beautiful, chic pop star,” Slayyyter says. “I just wanted to approach this music and be down to get ugly, be down to get gross.” Wor$t Girl in America washes away the Hollywood glamour she tried on with her second album, Starfucker, in 2023. In retrospect, she sees that album similarly to that ill-fated bag she purchased. Slayyyter figured listeners would buy into the fantasy she had built around satirizing fame — but it was only flashy until it fell apart. The money she poured into touring wasn’t coming back, and frankly, she wasn’t having fun.

Slayyyter got her first taste of success a few years earlier, in 2019, when she self-released a debut mixtape featuring the underground pop hits “Mine” and “Daddy AF.” Growing up in Missouri, she had spent her teenage years on Tumblr, watching the way online success alchemized the careers of artists like Marina and the Diamonds, Lana Del Rey, and Tyler, the Creator. When she first saw it happening with her own music, it made her hunger for more. After she moved to L.A., people around her filled her head with promises that her mainstream breakthrough was imminent.

When it didn’t come after her 2021 debut, Troubled Paradise, or Starfucker, Slayyyter thought maybe she should call it. “I feel like everyone thinks I’m kind of corny,” she remembers voicing. “This isn’t working.” She began to plan Wor$t Girl in America as her final sendoff. “I was so depressed while making a lot of it, and I felt so hopeless,” Slayyyter says. She reached a decision that she admits, in hindsight, was a little dramatic: “I will leave behind one really great album that I’m proud of and it probably won’t go anywhere, like the rest haven’t, and that’s fine.”

A future without music wouldn’t have been completely bleak. She considered taking some classes and turning her love of making clothes into a new career. Maybe she could have been content with that. But her life wouldn’t have been half as electrifying as the one she’s been living for the past few months.

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“Everything is different now,” Slayyyter says. She first felt the shift in April, when she delivered one of the most acclaimed performances at this year’s Coachella festival. Thousands of bodies spilled out of the Mojave Tent as the singer raged onstage, two weekends in a row. The two-punch combo of “Crank” and “Yes Goddd” sent an electric current through the crowd, while “Brittany Murphy” and “Gas Station” dug deep into her thoughts on death and abandonment. “I feel like I blacked out during that performance,” Slayyyter says. “I got offstage and hugged my friend Anna, and just cried. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we did it.’”

Coachella marked Slayyyter’s first performance with a live band. She limited the set to songs from Wor$t Girl in America to make a statement about this transformative phase of her career. Still, she’s thankful for the lessons of her earlier releases. “All that music felt like building blocks to figuring out my sound, and it took me a long time,” she says. “This could have never been my debut album.”

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A few months after the festival, Slayyyter is in the process of making new music inspired by the sudden influx of attention she’s received — even from people she suspects only like her now because everyone else does. “I want to live here for a little longer, so I’m kind of making an inverse album, if you will,” she says. “I just want the core of everything to feel like me, because it finally feels that.”

If it all ended with Wor$t Girl in America, Slayyyter wanted to be sure this album represented not only the artist she’d been for the past eight years, but also Catherine Grace Garner — the person beneath the pop-star costume. “Starting out, it all felt a little bit more like a character or a fantasy, because I didn’t feel secure with being myself as much,” Slayyyter says. This time, she adds, “I didn’t feel the need to create a character. I really am this person.”

When Slayyyter shows up for our interview, she introduces herself to everyone on set as Grace. Earlier in her career, even the idea of people trying to find her real name made her uncomfortable. Her younger self would stagger at how much she lays bare on Wor$t Girl in America. “A lot of this album comes from feeling like the annoying girl who’s being a little too much at a party, or feeling like you don’t fit in with people,” Slayyyter says.

Back home in Missouri, her favorite pastime used to be drinking with her skater friends at “kickbacks where it would just be trash and cigarettes and bullshit everywhere,” but she’s become more of a homebody as she approaches 30. The night before we spoke, she made her late-night debut on The Tonight Show and celebrated for a few hours afterward, then called it a night. “I’ve gotten really good at stopping when I need to stop,” Slayyyter says. “When you’re someone who has depression or someone who has struggled in your life, it’s easy to fall into traps where it feels so good to numb things with drinking or going out.”

Earlier in her career, Slayyyter got the sense that “people maybe underestimated my abilities, or my talents, or my taste levels,” she says. She hadn’t yet realized that “maybe you shouldn’t get so drunk and do 10 shots and be crazy” around the people she wanted to take her seriously.

These days, Slayyyter has learned to accept the comparisons she often receives to other pop artists, like fellow Midwest princess Chappell Roan and boundary-pushing star Charli XCX (who gave her career an early boost by featuring Slayyyter’s songs on her “The Motherfucking Future” playlist). “It’s human nature to need familiarity to grasp onto something new,” she says. “Trajectory-wise, though, I do understand. Chappell, her first Coachella was such a moment that led to this big breakthrough. I do understand it feels like a familiar rise, because it’s like a slow burn of eight years of having a career and then these moments are all coming after the fact. But I feel like I’m always doing my thing.”

Slayyyter’s self-directed videos for Wor$t Girl in America use bloody body horror to dismantle the social and beauty standards women are held to, especially in pop. She has an affinity for scary movies (“I saw The Substance six times in theaters. I’m not kidding”), but also visuals that “make you feel unsettled, or things you feel like you’re gonna get in trouble for watching” — she loves the Prodigy’s infamous 1997 music video for “Smack My Bitch Up,” for instance.

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Beyond that, her influences are wide-ranging, extending to a viral picture of Rihanna rolling a blunt on her security guard’s head at Coachella in 2012. “That went triple platinum on Tumblr,” she says. “Hang it in the Louvre.” When Slayyyter returned to Tumblr in 2024, she remembered exactly why she loved it so much as a teen. “It wasn’t about luxury,” she says.

It wasn’t about fame, either. “I am never interested in calling myself famous,” she says. She might not be able to help it, though. A quiet life back in Missouri doesn’t seem to be in the cards for Slayyyter anytime soon. The spotlight is calling.