By Connor Telford
The world is obsessed with the grind. Between nepotism baby discourse, Twitter campaigns, and Genius lyric annotations, it’s not enough for pop music fanatics, and by proxy, the entire internet, to just enjoy celebrity content anymore — it has to be homegrown, ethically sourced, intentionally crafted celebrity content. But it also has to be fun. And it has to be original. And it has to be noncompetitive. And then it’s okay to enjoy. The product can’t just be good to eat; the factory it comes from has to be up to code.
Slayyyter understands these terms and conditions better than any other pop star, not only because she was a student of Stan Twitter long before she was making music but also because she’s probably the pop star most familiar with the workings of an iPod Nano, and on her new album Starfucker, she’s ready to show off her pop knowledge. Born Catherine Grace Garner in the suburbs of St. Louis in the ‘90s, Slayyyter came of age in the era of Juicy Couture and 4-on-the-floor, and it shows. Her early SoundCloud output is studded with visual and aural McBling signifiers — Juicy lockets, Hello Kitty, candy skulls, fried blond hair, pencil-thin eyebrows, Britney vocal fry, buzzsaw synths, rock candy bass, and indelible sugar rush pop hooks. Everyone and their mother is riding the Y2K nostalgia wave currently, but Slayyyter was doing it back when it truly felt like a novelty.
To this day, it’s rare for a pop star to appear with a persona as unique and fully-formed as Slayyyter’s debut era, emerging from a hot pink tanning bed on the cover of her self-titled mixtape and quickly becoming the internet’s pop princess, securing collabs with Charli XCX and underground legend Ayesha Erotica before selling out her first ever live performance. She made music that was distinct, but more importantly, she made music that seemed like she actually wanted to listen to it. For a while, Slayyyter was doing nothing but chewing the world’s sweetest gum and blowing the world’s biggest bubble.
But every bubble has to pop. While Slayyyter’s persona during the Slayyyter era was a whole original in the pop music realm, her musical abilities had noticeable limits. Her thin vocals only worked in a select few contexts, and her inexperience with songwriting showed over the course of the mixtape. It’s an incredibly frontloaded project; the first four tracks are also the four best. The rest of the songs range from gimmicky fun (“Daddy AF”) to half-baked tackiness (“Tattoo”), and their small-scale DIY nature only worked when their hooks were endlessly loopable (which most weren’t, with the exception of the aforementioned opening four tracks). For a pop star with unlimited potential, Slayyyter’s actual music had a limited shelf life.
Her 15 minutes of fame appeared even shorter when old tweets resurfaced online from Slayyyter’s teenage Fifth Harmony stan account showcasing her previous use of racial slurs, spelling a quick death for all the internet hype and goodwill that she had generated. After a brief hiatus, she returned with a notes app apology, followed soon by a longer handwritten one and donations to charities benefitting black trans youth, which many fans viewed as a step in the right direction, but it didn’t save her crown as the internet’s pop princess from tipping (and probably being stolen by Doja Cat). (Author’s note: I’m not a person of color, so I’m not going to provide an opinion on whether or not Slayyyter’s actions are forgivable. It’s not really up to me. You can find her tweets, apology, donations, and fan reactions here.)
Slayyyter’s next effort attempted to regain her momentum with middling success. Her major label debut, Troubled Paradise, is uncompromising, unreserved, and to be honest, undercooked. Partially hampered by the pandemic, Troubled Paradise seemed to exchange the terminally online sound of Slayyyter for a more minimalist industrial sound that fizzles out by the album’s second half. For a debut album, Troubled Paradise is more defined by individual moments than a complete statement. “Over This!” is the only track that manages to recapture the glory of her best early work, fusing hyperpop fizz with the angsty pop-punk glory of Avril Lavigne in her prime. Beyond that, the title track’s epic bridge demonstrates Slayyyter’s songwriting growth, “Throatzillaaa” is memeable crass fun, and “Letters” is her first and most successful attempt at a ballad. Beyond these highlights, the tracklist is full of… nothing. Troubled Paradise is pure fluff, lacking the distinct Y2K bent of her debut and demonstrating intention but only minimal progression in terms of musical growth.
It’s an all but foregone conclusion that much of Troubled Paradise’ potential was swallowed by the pandemic, but many other pop artists made some of their best work in their own home. Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now were both hailed as isolation icons, and it’s not like Slayyyter is unfamiliar with making music in her bedroom. Ironically, perhaps the best thing to come out of the Troubled Paradise era was Slayyyter’s remix of Britney Spears’ “Gimme More”, a Soundcloud exclusive that found new life on TikTok (due to Slayyyter being unable to afford clearing the sample). Slayyyter’s carefree voice floats bitchily over one of the most tightly crafted pop songs ever made, immediately demonstrating her aptitude for dark, glossy pop meant for driving around in Grand Theft Auto. Britney has been perhaps her most prominent influence since her debut, and there’s something that elevates Slayyyter when she fuses trashiness with glamour instead of playing it straight.
And so we arrive at Starfucker. Slayyyter’s sophomore soirée, dropped on September 22nd, is clearly the star’s favorite project so far and the one with the most distinctly recognizable Pinterest board. The album cover almost resembles one, as Slayyyter stands in a havoc-stricken hotel room complete with faux-panther chaise, telephone off the hook on the carpet, empty martini glass, bouquet arrangement, cigarette in hand, and cleavage on display for a touch of tackiness. It brings to mind an image of James Bond’s nightstand in Goldfinger if it were rendered by Erté. More than anything else, it’s a complete world. Compared to the tanning bed of Slayyyter and the green-screened poppy field of Troubled Paradise, Starfucker’s album cover feels like an expansive and expensive cinematic vision.
This sentiment applies to the rest of the album as well. Slayyyter has spoken at length about Starfucker being inspired by her time in LA on the celebrity bubble, sometimes being starstruck and sometimes being the star in the room. This dichotomy informs almost every aspect of the album, and tension between dualities becomes an overarching theme — class vs. vulgarity, intimacy vs. detachment, hedonism vs. temperance, past vs. future. Starfucker is swinging big with these ideas, bigger than any of Slayyyter’s previous works. Cathy’s not in Missouri anymore, and it shows better than it ever did on Troubled Paradise.
Before delving into the album itself, however, I want to think about the space Starfucker occupies in the internet pop landscape. Slayyyter is a musician, but first and foremost, she’s a POP STAR. She’s the product of an interesting trend that started happening in the late 2010s. For years, music fans have had alternative pop stars to stan. The 80s had Kate Bush, the 90s had Bjork and PJ Harvey, the 2000s had Robyn, and the early 2010s had Lana Del Rey and Marina, diamonds included. These artists resisted mainstream success outside of their audiences primarily because of their sound, either for being too unconventional or too raw or some other off-putting factor. However, around 2013, something interesting happened to mainstream pop. The bright, colorful, carefree landscape began turning darker and moodier. This shift can be traced back to figures like The Weeknd and the aforementioned Lana Del Rey, but the big light switch moment came with the release of Lorde’s “Royals”. Lorde’s cutting takedown of pop’s materialistic, outlandish stylings (despite her embrace of them) shifted the needle away from mania and towards downtempo mood destabilizers, laying the groundwork for the biggest pop stars of the late 2010s and early 2020s: Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, even SZA. Now, mainstream pop is pivoting back towards the retro-shine of the 80s thanks to Dua Lipa and Doja Cat, but for a while, it was all heavy bass and moody whispers.
What’s interesting about this trend is that alternative pop stars took the opposite route. The alt-pop icons of the late 2010s trended towards kinetic and sugary: Charli XCX, Kim Petras, Carly Rae Jepsen, and of course, Slayyyter. Outside of Charli’s more abrasive textures, there was almost nothing stopping these artists from being mainstream solely based on their musical output (one could make an argument for Slayyyter’s tackier tendencies, but even then, she wasn’t that far left-field of Kesha’s biggest hits). There was very little about any of them that read as alternative at that point in time, even if they used their niche status to try things that they probably wouldn’t have otherwise (Kim’s Halloween LP comes to mind). The reason they weren’t mainstream was solely because they weren’t operating in the mode that radio pop was at the time. There’s no reason that Slayyyter and Kim couldn’t have achieved mainstream relevancy 5 to 10 years earlier, and Charli and Carly had flashes of it. In the cases of Kim and Slayyyter, this was primarily because their artistic references WERE mainstream. Slayyyter pulled from Britney and Gaga, and Kim’s musical DNA lay with her main producer, who shall remain nameless here.
The point of these observations is that these pop stars belong to a new lineage of artists who make strictly pop music without the roaring commercial success that assuredly comes along with it, instead finding life on the internet through stan culture. Without a snappy term for them, we can think of them as Internet Pop Stars. Other examples include but are not limited to Muna, Chappell Roan, Caroline Polachek, Rina Sawayama, and Allie X. There’s something about each of these artists that has prevented them from becoming fully mainstream, even though they make by-and-large digestible pop. They often inspire extremely dedicated online fanbases, get put on Spotify-curated playlists, and become concert openers for pop’s biggest players. Muna opened for Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan is opening for Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek opened for Dua Lipa, and of course, Slayyyter opened for Tove Lo. One could argue that Tove Lo is also an Internet Pop Star, albeit a much more well-known one thanks to her radio stint in the mid-2010s.
These artists all gained prominence in the wake of poptimism, a movement arguing that pop music is just as worthy of critical praise and artistic merit as other genres. The fact that Internet Pop Stars exist, are inspired artistically by mainstream pop, and continue to create work without the insane commercial gain of the 1% is a vote of confidence for poptimism, and although plenty of them make bad music, so do many rock outlets. As a trade-off, these artists get to stick to completely controlled creative visions, but without the massive budgets of their A-List peers.
There’s a very prominent theory in the world of film studies that seems applicable here. In 1950s France, a group of film critics and fanatics including but not limited to Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard began publishing on the idea of the director as a visionary in reaction to the Hollywood studio system. In their eyes, certain directors displayed not only a streak of technical mastery but also a distinctive personal style, the combination of which led to more interesting films that were also more worthy of study. This theory became known as Auteur Theory, and it gained widespread popularity through the bolstering of Andrew Sarris. Auteur Theory is now widely taught and debated in film studies classrooms, with some endorsing it as a guidepost for cinematic literacy while others dismiss it as reductive and ignorant of the collaborative nature of filmmaking. For all its faults and shirking of complexity, the positioning of the director as the mastermind of the film, with each decision being a symbol of their creative intent, is a prevailing school of thought in film academia.
Although it lacks a name, this school of thought also looms large over pop music. It has become increasingly important over the years for pop stars to write their own songs; Taylor Swift is the biggest pop star in the world right now, primarily BECAUSE she is the author of the Taylor Swift brand. This idea has become so dominant that it’s basically a prerequisite to pop stardom. Gone are the days of producers and songwriters shopping around tracks from musician to musician; Britney recording a demo of “Umbrella” before ultimately letting it go to Rihanna would never happen today. Sure, songwriters and producers are still integral to the machine, and some pop stars even double as songwriters on the side (Charli XCX penned several of the late 2010s’ biggest radio hits before jumping into the hyperpop lane). But now more than ever before, pop stars have to come in with a vision that’s their own rather than executing a vision that was assigned to them. This shift could be interpreted as a side effect of poptimism— because pop music is viewed more seriously and artistically, pop stars are no longer studio directors and actors: they are auteurs.
Which brings us back to Slayyyter and Starfucker. It’s not surprising that an album with a host of cinematic inspirations feels incredibly auteurist. Slayyyter has cited films like Basic Instinct and Body Heat as well as albums like The Fame and Electra Heart, but Starfucker’s most prominent forebearer is probably Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder’s classic Hollywood noir is gothic, waxy, and glamorous, a perfect blend of mythologizing and satirizing. Starfucker reads similarly; it’s the first Slayyyter project that sounds like it takes place in one location. Listening to Starfucker sounds like experiencing a murder mystery in the lobby of the Château Marmont.
Opener “I Love Hollywood!” immediately establishes the album’s sonic universe, with Slayyyter tossing out style signifiers over a smoky club beat. She namedrops Sunset Tower, Dr. Weiss, and Terry Richardson in the second verse alone. This is an elusive and dirty world, one that draws people in with its glittery allure before slathering them in grime. Slayyyter is more than aware of this transformation. “Don’t bring Cathy, she’s a cunt,” she casually tosses out in the opening verse, shedding her Missouri skin and fully committing to the LA sleaze of the Slayyyter persona. It’s an extremely apt opener given what’s to come.
The songs on Starfucker primarily serve to either flesh out the world of the album or create pop perfection; the best tracks do both. “Miss Belladonna” is an early stunner where Slayyyter further carves out her femme fatale erotic thriller persona as she sings about luring men into her web before spitting them right back out, embodying the Hollywood machine. The highlight is the towering chorus, which thunders like the best tracks from The Fames Monster. “He lives for love and I live for drama,” she proclaims, stretching out the last syllable for extra flair before concluding with an operatic belt that positions her as a figure of worship. She somehow manages to immediately top herself with “Dramatic”, a slice of noir-tinged synthpop that soars from start to finish. Here, Slayyyter finds herself interested in a man who’s clearly obsessed with her for shallow purposes, but she’s not mad at the attention. “Don’t be dramatic, just say the word and you’ll have it,” she hooks with a towering eye-roll. The sneaky genius of the chorus is that it subtly reveals her as the one who needs something in the relationship, even though she’s in the position of power. “I’ll give you everything that you want, touch you in the way that she won’t, love you in the way that she don’t” reeks of desperation masquerading as confidence. She’s holding this guy hostage like Norma Desmond keeping Joe Gillis locked up in her Deco million-dollar mansion (another reference that Slayyyter mentions specifically). The hooks stack up, amounting to the high point of the record.
“My Body” continues this theme of desperation with even more energy, and it’s the track that best demonstrates Slayyyter’s growth as a musician, possibly because it has the most obvious comparison point in her discography. You’d be forgiven for initially assuming the song to be a sequel to mixtape track “Touch My Body”, but beyond nomenclature, the two songs are almost nothing alike. The mixtape cut featured one of Slayyyter’s thinnest vocal performances and weakest melodies; neither is a problem here. “My Body” pulses with propulsion, fueled by a thumping chorus and Slayyyter’s extremely convictive vocals. She really sells the anguish of needing attention, particularly with an extended yelp of desperation that’s so nice she does it twice. It’s an impressive performance from a pop star who used to struggle with anything that wasn’t Britney huskiness. “My Body” does suffer a little from being the fourth track in a row to utilize a spoken word prechorus, but the song only tries it once before Slayyyter retires it for the rest of Starfucker’s runtime.
“Rhinestone Heart” is another strong point, mainly because its glittery chorus is so addictive. It’s the type of melody that feels so perfectly obvious that it’s insane it didn’t already exist, beautiful and tragic in equal measure. Tumblr would have eaten it up in 2013.
What’s most impressive about the first half of Starfucker is its consistency. Gone are the days of the self-titled mixtape and Troubled Paradise’s undercooked stutter. Slayyyter goes for broke on every track, and for the most part, it works. The record feels lavish and seductive, fully committed to the riches of its world, but it leaves room to explore its hollowness and superficiality. The best pop records straddle that line, and Starfucker’s opening run strikes exactly the right tonal mixture.
The back half is a little more jittery, but it doesn’t feel like a derailment. “Erotic Electronic” kickstarts a pivot into pure hedonism, one that reads like a course correction from the glitzy tears of “Rhinestone Heart”. It would land better if it didn’t feel solely like a transition. “Purr!” is Starfucker’s answer to self-titled’s “Daddy AF” and Troubled Paradise’s “Throatzillaaa”, leaning into Slayyyter’s crass, tacky side with relative success. “Plastic” does the same, but it gets superior results thanks to a stronger point of view. “Girl Like Me” feels like the record’s first full-blown miss, mostly because it doesn’t play into its sweetness enough. It’s meant to feel like a respite, a wholesome possible alternative to the pure camp of “Purr!” and “Plastic”, but its lyrics are too nondescript to conceivably shake Slayyyter out of her self-destructive tendencies from the prior tracks. It also suffers from melodic staleness, a trait it shares with “Tear Me Open”.
Fortunately, the jump from “Tear Me Open” to “Out of Time” wakes Starfucker right back up again, just in time for the finale. “Out of Time” is sleek and nocturnal, the perfect theoretical concluding point for the record. It’s unfortunate that it feels like the only song on the album that occupies the same sonic space as other pop stars; its musical DNA is very similar to The Weeknd’s recent output and Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, landing right in the current trend of spectral ‘80s new wave. “Out of Time” also goes big but not big enough. It feels like a finale, but not a grand one. The transition from the bridge to the final chorus in particular feels like a missed opportunity for some string flourishes or a similar melodramatic touch. This is not to say that “Out of Time” is a bad song or a bad album closer; on the contrary, it’s an indomitably cool pop song that closes the book on Starfucker without providing easy answers. “She hates herself, but if they all love her, then she don’t mind,” Slayyyter laments, basically spelling out the album’s thesis statement. Fame is glamorously addictive and destructive, and although Slayyyter probably won’t break that cycle, she can at least mythologize it.
Starfucker feels like a major progression for Slayyyter’s career trajectory, mostly because it feels like her first fully-developed artistic statement. It’s a pop album with a strong musical point-of-view, but it goes one better because that point-of-view seeps into everything from the album cover to its music videos. Slayyyter was a pop music aficionado before she was ever a pop star, the Francois Truffaut of the Internet pop scene (lord, forgive me for that comparison). Starfucker is studied and carefree, evoking the best parts of Gaga and Marina and all her other heroes. It resists mainstream absorption while also demonstrating mainstream appeal. Fortunately, it also leaves room for growth. Slayyyter’s Château Marmont elevator is only going up from here.
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