An idiotic U.S. president launches a disastrous, poorly considered, escalating war in the Middle East that neocon sickos have been dreaming about since 1996’s Clean Break memo got Bibi Netanyahu all hot and bothered for Greater Israel. The United States’ hubris, short-sighted stupidity, and limitless taste for con artistry plunge the entire globe into economic turmoil. The Strokes announce a new album. People are hyped to use an old-school photobooth on the Lower East Side. Did we spiral through a time warp and return to the aughts?! Everything old is new again! Of course, a few things are different. As much as I couldn’t stand George W. Bush at the time, even he of the golf-swinging “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers…Now, watch this drive!” never said anything as droolingly demented as “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” or “A whole civilization will die tonight.” And as hipster-y as photobooths used to be at bars, nobody lined up for 30 minutes like they were at Disneyworld to pay $8(!) for four snaps that will soon be rephotographed for Instagram.

Still, the similarities are hard to ignore. Why shouldn’t music also follow suit and rekindle the sounds of trying on flannel shirts, skinny jeans, and skinnier scarves at Urban Outfitters? Think danceable indie electronica of the kind that distracted us from the gnawing anxiety, casualty statistics, right-wing government batshittery, economic devastation, and diminishing futures the last time! Well, hedonistic drug-fueled escapism with a heavy dose of aughts nostalgia is exactly what Slayyyter offers on her phenomenal and a bit psychotic new experimental pop album WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA. Even she knows she’s pioneering the indie sleaze revival that has been foretold ever since the eponymous Instagram account showed the world just how sweaty digital cameras made everyone look at Lit Lounge. Just listen to her proclamation on the strutting, screaming, pumped-up,“$T. LOSER”: “If kids are bumping my shit, that’s a recession indicator.”

If that’s true, it looks like we’d better save our pennies with the overwhelming online hype boosting WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA as the album of the year (so far). I’ll admit, I wasn’t that familiar with Slayyyter’s music before hearing the viral rumblings declaring the album this season’s brat. The comparisons with Charli xcx’s 2024 dominating album derive not just from its cranked-up, discordant, lost-my-coat-in-the-club sound, but also another pop singer who tossed out easily digestible boppy melodies for grating electro throbbing—and was rewarded for it. Others should take note! WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA far surpasses brat, though, which is too wan for my tastes. Charli’s club classics always felt like she was stomping around her bedroom rather than a transportive, full-body high experience, which Slayyyter nails here. Take the opener “DANCE…” which works as a statement of intent for the rest of the debauched album. It begins with a dissonant, high-pitched buzzing whirr that wouldn’t be out of place on a Xiu Xiu release. The drill noise spins…and rises…and rises, until it ecstatically tumbles into an enveloping synth boogie, with Slayyyter’s voice humming, hovering over the music. The lyrics, too, illustrate a moment of decadent, almost nihilistic abandon, paired with the, at times, soaring unrestrained wailing vocals: hating someone while still grinding on them at the club. She demands repeatedly, “It doesn’t matter, let me dance!” Slayyyter is just here to party!

Sure, people could keep comparing WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA to brat—or even Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM, if she made the entire album like her revelatory possessed gasping and grunting opener, “Disease,” rather than reverting to more palpable Prince and Bowie idol worship. But that’s selling Slayyyter’s record a tad short. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is a crunchy, distorted, abrasive tour de force that, at points, with songs like “CRANK,” reaches such a screeching techno terminal velocity that the only other musical project I can compare it to is Azealia Banks’s brain-batteringly berserk YRII, a demented, next to unlistenable anti-classic. In fact, Slayyyter’s album is such an all-encompassing assault of revving, surging futuristic production that it somehow hits on exactly what I wanted from Kim Gordon after The Collective rather than her half-baked Playboi Carti throwaways on PLAY ME.

Though the album transcends easy genre slotting, encompassing the heavy feedback dance-punk of fellow Missourians SSION, trip-hop beats, and even a sprinkle of surf punk on “CANNIBALISM,” the sound that Slayyyter invokes the most is indie sleaze, aka basically any music played at Lower East Side bars post-9/11. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is more the electro indie of bands like Crystal Castles and MGMT than the concurrent garage revival, with the exception of  “CANNIBALISM,” which, from its throwback guitar riff to Slayyyter’s tremor-y stone-c-o-o-o-old delivery, heavily recalls The White Stripes. “GAS STATION” first plays like a Lana Del Rey track about being unceremoniously dumped at a Sheetz, but instead of remaining sulking, smoking cigarettes around the pumps, the song blasts into the 8-bit bleeps of Crystal Castles, like Slayyyter decided to throw a party in the snack aisle. “GAS STATION” isn’t the only song that reinterprets the joy of listening to Crystal Castles without the drag of having to think about Ethan Kath being an abuser (like so many of the aughts men). “OLD FLING$,” named after a bar a few blocks from my apartment, buries Slayyyter’s nearly unintelligible vocals under pulsating Crystal Castles video game throwbacks. Now, is this indie sleaze nostalgia too heavy-handed? Perhaps. But who cares?! The MGMT-like conclusion of the cacophonous and consumerist “BEAT UP CHANEL$” (“Money, drugs, chains on my chest, that vintage Celine”) activates something deep inside my old-fuck millennial brain like a MK Ultra-ed sleeper agent. Quick! I need to scour eBay for American Apparel and ragged, cigarette-burned Chanel purses that Mary-Kate Olsen abandoned in 2006!

This isn’t to say there aren’t a few clunkers in the bunch. “OLD TECHNOLOGY” makes its aughts romanticism a bit too literal with references to iPods and Tumblr blogs. Though Steve Jobs-era namechecks are on the nose, the real wince-inducing inclusion is the repetition of “You copy-paste the vibe” and the yelping, “old technology!” which reminds me of Grimes’s abysmal, heavy-handed latest, like “I Wanna Be Software,” a putrid stinker that I’ve tried very hard to forget even exists. At least I can listen to “OLD TECHNOLOGY” without the baggage of c’s techno-fascism and monarchical Mencius Moldbug admiration. Still, “OLD TECHNOLOGY”’s staccato sludge and the eternal return of the declarative earworm, “I’m doing drugs tonight,” also give off the stench of a reject from Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals, though now that I’m writing this, it sounds kind of awesome. Similarly, the sneering, intentionally ironic, “I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS” feels better placed on a Christeene record, which, again, I realize is not exactly a negative critique. Yet, the song, which sees Slayyyter embody an obnoxious club braggart who boasts about knowing the DJ and being a semi-celebrity, is made for a hoot of a drag performance rather than an otherwise stellar pop album. That being said, “I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS” is saved by one of its purposefully camp lines, which makes me chuckle every time: “I didn’t step off the train tonight to get mean-mugged by some ugly bitches!” Me neither, hun!

That’s not the only camp moment on WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, which joins my beloved Addison Rae, with her breathy lines like, “The world is my oyster. Baby come touch the pearl,” and imagery of cigarettes smushed between her tibbies, in returning camp to its rightful place in pop. Though a lot has been made of Slayyyter’s line, “He wanna fuck Slayyyter. Richard, we should link later,” which tickles the fancies of cinephiles (though still doesn’t make me want to see Richard Linklater’s Breathless do-over Nouvelle Vague), equal praise must be given to “UNKNOWN LOVERZ,” which portrays the ecstatic lunacy of ignoring friends’ desperate warnings about a one-sided bad romance, as Slayyyter trills, “It’s love, it’s love, it’s looove” while the object of her fixation ignores her calls. Another favorite is “BRITTANY MURPHY.” Like The Bad Seeds’ “Lay Me Low,” this song imagines a posthumous tribute aware of and slightly apologetic for her own foibles, contrasting her crash out to the doomed starlet for whom the song is titled: “Tell them I was such a funny girl. “Annoying”’s probably a better word.” Like the repeated imagery of scatterbrained strung-out searching for a misplaced jacket in “BRITTANY MURPHY.,” Slayyyter’s album offers a slew of suggested trash antics for girls who want to act bad: stealing Supreme out of a dude’s closet; owning a “brand-new Benz and a DUI”; getting gay off of tequila; sucking Richard off in a hotel elevator; and screaming, “BITCH, I’M A STAR” like an obnoxious wannabe Pearl.

Yet, it’s not so much what she says but how she says it. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA features perhaps one of the most manic vocal performances I’ve ever heard on an album. Within a little over forty minutes, she channels Courtney Love’s gut-tearing screams; Lady Gaga’s octave-leaping belts; Lizzy Grant’s red-white-and-blue baby voice; and even Cardi B’s flow in the second verse of “CRANK.” Hell, I can even hear Seth Bogart’s nasal punk Ronnie Spector-worshiping whine in places. Between the many vocal influences and the aughts sonic landscape, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA does tread perilously close to becoming too much of a pastiche. Yet, it was a risk worth taking, as the album doesn’t sound like a copycat to me. This is partially due to the utter unpredictability of so much of the album. For instance, every time I assumed I had a handle on what Slayyyter was doing with her voice, something new would surprise me, like the snarling growl on “$T. LOSER” which echoes and flies off to join the ingeniously produced, transcendentally immersive mix. The album is a relentless pedal-to-the-floor ride that only slows momentarily for–what else?–the hushed Prayer of St. Francis, wedged between the passively suicidal “WHAT IS IT LIKE, TO BE LIKED?” and the funereal jam “BRITTANY MURPHY.” to remind us: “It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.” Maybe. But, with WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, Slayyyter proves you don’t have to wait until the end to find immortality—or infamy!