“For me, it was always either this would work out, or I would be done with it and move in with my mom again,” Slater explains candidly over a phone call from New York.
The 29-year-old Missouri-born singer-songwriter is just hours away from her major label debut, Wur$t girl in AmericaAdmittedly, she’s nervous. After grinding it out over the past decade and releasing two albums on Fader Label, Slayyyter is upfront about this album feeling like a last chance of sorts, a project she poured everything into.
But those pre-release nerves were all in vain, and the album is sure to create a distinctive before-and-after period in her career. Wur$t girl in America It became her first album to chart on the Billboard 200 chart with 26,900 equivalent units, opening at No. 22. It’s a modest but promising opening for a long-running pop act, and it’s already 20,000 more units than the debut of her last record Starfocker.
“Slayyyter had a unique vision for this album and its accompanying images. We at Records and our partners at Columbia supported her every step of the way,” says Barry Weiss, co-founder of Records. Hollywood Reporter In a statement. The executive points out that Slayyyer deserves more than the success she is enjoying from this album.
“My family didn’t have the money. I don’t have connections to the music industry, so I feel like it all seemed very random to me in the first place, but I didn’t really have a backup plan or any financial cushion to do this whole music thing,” Slater explains.
“I kind of got over it, and more than that, I was labeled up and coming, and I tried hard not to lose money on tours and all that stuff,” she adds of her mindset before. Wur$t girl in America.
Slater says she told herself she would make “one last album” and if that didn’t work out, she would go back to school or discover another career path. “I go into the studio and treat it like it’s the last album I’ll ever make,” she says. “What do I want that to look like? What do I want to leave behind? What do I want to say? What do I want to talk about?”
The singer says she abandoned the idea of following a trend and chose to create an album that looked exactly like her. That mentality led Wur$t girl in AmericaAn electric mix of vulnerability and nostalgia. Slayyyter says she channeled things she’d see on Tumblr as a teenager into the album art. She emphasized that everything on this album came from a pure place.
The killer had no desire for outside influence on him Wur$t girl in America. She says she wanted these songs to be the songwriter and for her producers to help her write and craft the songs. “I didn’t want anyone to modify my ideas or modify my identity,” she says. “I feel like over the last couple of years, I’ve edited myself to try to feel like a legitimate artist next to everyone else, which is stupid because I feel like this album is more legitimate than anything else.”
The album’s first single, “Beat Up Chanel$,” is an example of a song that only a Slayyyter could sing. In a throwback to the good old days – you know, 2010s – it combines dance music with pop vocals and a touch of rap.
It’s easy to try to compare Slayyyter to some of the dance-pop artists who made party music before her — Kesha in particular seems to be frequent company — but Slayyter is forging her own style, both sonically and in her album visuals. “I’m not trying to imitate anyone else,” she says. “I’m not trying to compare myself to any other artist.”
“I feel like sometimes it’s not even a specific song or artist reference,” Slater explains when asked about some of her influences on Wur$t girl in America. She says she will find inspiration from clothes she owns or movie trailers.
“I had this Chanel bag where the plastic had cracks in it. It was this old, really dirty, cheap bag that I got from Vestiaire Collective that I insulted someone with,” she says. “I was going to tie this super scarf to it and it inspired me. I was making music that sounded like it was shiny pink or purple.”
The suggestion that Slayyyter was at a watershed moment because of outside pressure penetrating her because of her age seems absurd when you remember that she has not yet reached her thirtieth birthday. But it puts real pressure on young women across the music industry. “I feel like in music, as a woman, there’s an unspoken pressure that you have an expiration date on how young and attractive you can be for however long,” she says. “I don’t care at all about that now.”
Slairter says she’s excited to turn 30. “I was afraid of it,” she admits, but notes that she thinks she is cooler, more confident and has better taste than when she was younger.
“I think the pressure to make it at a young age can be really stressful and really annoying because you don’t even know who you are yet,” she says, adding that it’s “just the kind of bullshit” that’s expected to happen when an artist is very young.
The singer says that every song she wrote or every time she performed helped her skills become stronger and led her to become the artist she is now. “I don’t think a young person could make an album like this,” she says. “A lot of it has to do with my own perspective on 2010’s indie eSports, which I studied a lot in middle school and high school.”
This weekend, Slayyyter is scheduled to make her debut at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. She will next head to Governors Ball and Lollapalooza later this summer. “I’m so excited,” she gushes. “I’ve been touring for so long at this point that being on stage feels natural to me. I’m creating this next era of my music.”
She will be performing at Coachella with a band, which is a new element for the singer. “It’s like I’m starting over, in a way, just because I’m used to performing a certain way or with a DJ,” says Slater, noting that she feels “very alive” while performing on stage.
“I’m glad I’m getting these opportunities now just because I feel prepared,” she says. “I know what I want to do with it. I know what it should be, what it’s going to sound like and what makes sense to me now and what makes this music make sense, rather than trying to do something that’s not going to be authentic to me just because I think that’s what it’s supposed to do because I’m 22 years old.”
