Back in the days of pre-enshittified Tumblr, there was a blog called Pop Culture Died In 2009. The now-dormant account, run by blogger Matt James, dug into his mom's back issues of Star Magazine and the remnants of Web 1.0 gossip sites on the Internet Archive to surface old tabloid covers, ill-begotten paparazzi shots, and other quietly forgotten but deeply influential ephemera of 2000s pop culture. Like many Tumblr blogs, it had a hyperspecific audience: everyone who can conjure, from memory, one specific tabloid photo of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan together in a car.
In other words, its audience was Catherine Garner, better known as Slayyyter. She's an avowed fan of the blog — which isn't surprising, given that she seems to have existed everywhere else in the online music world. As her stage name suggests, she comes directly from Stan Twitter: Before becoming a musician, she ran One Direction and Fifth Harmony stan accounts called @harrys_anaconda and @camilkacowbello. She spent so much time on early-oughts Tumblr that her recent single "OLD FLING$" was premiered by the Tumblr editorial team — I didn't know Tumblr even had an editorial team anymore. If she'd come up during the Myspace era, she would definitely have played Warped Tour (probably alongside Millionaires), and she would absolutely have an extremely long and varied "Influences" list on her profile, like Kesha did. Here, I'll start one off: Crystal Castles, Luciana, Sleigh Bells, Justice, Lady Gaga, Jessie Malakouti, MGMT, Marie Davidson, 3OH!3, Republica, Soft Cult, Nine Inch Nails, Kid Cudi, Ladytron, Kelly Clarkson, 100 gecs.
2026 has been very good to Slayyyter; her new album WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA got Best New Music from Pitchfork out of seemingly nowhere, and she played Coachella this month in a loud, ferocious breakout performance. What's surprising about her set isn't her stage presence, or the overflowing crowd — massive in proportion to her 3 p.m. timeslot — but two things. One, the fact that it was a physical, in-person manifestation of an artist who has existed until now almost entirely online. Two, that this breakout moment happened at all, after over 10 years in which it didn't.
You can't do Coachella without being on the Coachella poster, which visually sorts artists using a black box of metrics and backroom deals into quasi-tier lists. It's one of the more literal manifestations of the brutal hierarchy of the music industry; as one concert promoter told The Ringer, in what I assume was an attempt at reassurance gone wrong: "What does this person mean?" It is completely normal, in 2026, to be in the pop music industry for over a decade and still be considered an up-and-coming C-list star, which is about how Slayyyter was positioned in the Coachella lineup. But that doesn't make it easier for your career trajectory to play out in public, to the snarking of the public and the indifference of your label bosses; to be blog-famous but still working as a salon receptionist; or really to exist at all in an industry where the phrase "pushing 40" can feel off by 15 years.
Slayyyter has been open about the toll this took, and WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is her throwing her hands up to just be her most offputting self. The album is a product of the mind that came up with the titles "Starfucker" and "DADDY AF," and as one has come to expect from that, the lyrics largely revolve around doing all the wrong drugs and fucking all the wrong people. Calling it "artificial" isn't going far enough; as Courtney Love once said, she fakes it so real she is beyond fake. Slayyyter proudly bragged to Fader that one song had live instrumentation. It came right out of "this folder of real drum loops and basslines." (She did have a real corporeal band for her Coachella set.)
All of the above, though, could describe 2021’s Troubled Paradise, a more actually shallow Slayyyter album. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA also incorporates Garner's actual self: the girl whose musical taste was shaped as much by the radio as the Hype Machine and the iTunes Free Singles of the Week. (Here's a full list, if you want to age yourself.) The songs here are either light blogpop ditties with an unsettling subtext, or blown-out, dangerously loud electro singles that sound like vicious mutant kaiju versions of the 2009 pop charts. Many of the artists I mentioned above were direct inspirations for this album, cited by Slayyyter. They also comprise a non-trivial chunk of my formative musical taste — particularly when they overlap one another. Kesha didn't click for me until the dark, throbbing electro track "Take It Off." I was one of the people very invested in the lost media of Britney's supposedly confessional Original Doll and Xtina's hyped-up Ladytron demos. I have spent years telling anyone who'd listen that parts of Born This Way sound like something off Velocifero — it is my personal Pepe Silvia. And now, finally, someone has come along and understood exactly what I mean.
The intro to "DANCE..." is one arrangement tweak off from the intro to "Destroy Everything You Touch"; "YES GODDD" has a filter-house break that's hilariously blatant. "CRANK" and "$T. LOSER" (no relation) are oil-slicked sleazepits of distortion with obvious Crystal Castles influence, where Slayyyter tries two kinds of maximalist vocal: throat-destroying shrieks, and spiraling, operatic vamping above the treble scale. Much of this album sounds less at home on a dancefloor than an industrial Superfund site; parts of it unironically remind me of Marilyn Manson's The Beautiful People. (Probably don't go stream that to check, though.)
Given how image-forward Slayyyter is and how much her music plays upon nostalgia, lots of people have called her a "Y2K artist." (To be fair, so did she.) But that's exactly wrong. The Y2K era was defined, at least aesthetically, by techno-optimism: a world of futuristic avatars, silver and aquamarine and clear-Game Boy palettes. Those a little more versed in Internet aesthetics have placed Slayyyter a few years after that, in the Bratz-like rhinestone-and-animal-print-bedazzled McBling era. (Once again, so did she.) But that's not quite right either: the aesthetic was hedonistic and unwholesome, but at least people seemed to be having fun, in a Roaring Twenties kind of way.
No, Slayyyter is a product of the late 2000s. And as she says on this album: "If the kids are bumping my shit, that's a recession indicator." As anyone who was alive at the time should be able to tell you, the late 2000s are a terrible era to be nostalgic for. And the pop culture of the late 2000s perhaps the most terrible of all: are populated almost entirely by victims or bullies. Perez Hilton's "Controversy" section on Wikipedia is 10 headers long. Michael K of Dlisted didn't go a day without writing something that would now get him canceled. Gaga and Kesha made their early music amid trauma and abuse; Lohan and Spears stopped making music entirely. And the moral rot extended beyond pop. The indie world had its own caustic blogger in Carles of Hipster Runoff, and its own predatory photog, Terry Richardson. Slayyyter's biggest influence from the era, Crystal Castles, is hard to listen to now after Alice Glass accused bandmate Ethan Kath of sexual assault.
And Slayyyter's nostalgia is period-accurate: It taps into the nihilism of the era. This is the Slayyyter ethos: Guys suck, when they're even around. Girls also suck (except when tequila's around). Pity whoever's on the receiving end of "I'M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS," a caustic dismissal of her many hangers-on akin to Davidson's "Your Biggest Fan." Partying sucks, eventually — but it'll never suck as much as the things you try to escape by partying. "CANNIBALISM!" already had dark subtext by evoking "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)," but its take on crushes is almost mercenary; "Yeah, it's on, I heard he loves a blonde." On "Parking Lot," Slayyyter likens a bad relationship to a time when her father left her at a gas station; call it "DADDY ISSUES AF."
But what really unlocks WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is its brutal ending triptych, in which Slayyter descends into some of the bleakest places I've heard in pop music. "WHAT IS IT LIKE, TO BE LIKED?" begins as straightforward Pussycat Dolls-esque boasting, albeit with a backing chord progression that sounds vaguely off. But Slayyter becomes bitter fast ("I guess I'm lucky, get to club in different places") then plunges into a self-loathing hole that feels unnervingly true. Following this is "*PRAYER*," a prodigal partygirl's hymn. Technically, it's the second "hymn" on this album, after the surprisingly literal "YES GODDD." But where the latter's prayer is a feral, throat-destroying roar that contains the words "bitch, I'm a star," "PRAYER" is muted -- and not muted-for-Slayyyter, just muted, period. And "BRITTANY MURPHY" is fairly upbeat in sound but is textually a suicide note, beginning with "Remember me beautiful — that sentiment probably ain't true at all" and just getting more brutal from there. Slayyyter encases her voice in a distancing carapace of Auto-Tune, but abandons it in the last few unpolished seconds, as if giving up. It is not a coincidence that the song ends with a period.
While Murphy, the song's namesake, was another casualty of the 2000s — dying at age 32 amid sketchy circumstances, then having her death exploited further with a rubbernecking documentary — Slayyyter is openly writing about herself. She has alluded repeatedly in interviews to WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA being the record she'd want to leave behind if she died tomorrow. It probably doesn't say great things about this year that Slayyyter finally achieved her pop dreams by tapping into the darkest, bleakest parts of the psyche, both her own and that of the world around her. But unlike her 2000s predecessors, she's at least doing it fully of her own volition; the message is bleak, but it's a message of her own making. "I want people to feel like the worst girl in America themselves," she's said of the album. That's about as much as we can hope for this year.
POP TEN
Olivia Rodrigo - "Drop Dead"
If you Google the story behind "Just Like Heaven," one of the first results you'll get is this interview with Robert Smith from 2020, where he details its backstory: "The song's about hyper-ventilating – kissing and fainting to the floor." I am convinced Olivia Rodrigo also did that same Google search, given that she's now released a single that namedrops "Just Like Heaven," and is about kissing and fainting to the floor. (OK, fine: If we must stick to facts, the song's inclusion here is probably because Rodrigo is friends with Smith and brought him out during her Glastonbury set last year. I like my theory better.)
"Drop Dead" is once again written with Dan Nigro, and Rodrigo's sound is apparently starting to converge with his other collaborator (and her one-time tourmate), Chappell Roan. I hear Roan's recent material in the folk-rock tinge and especially the trilled high notes on the chorus. I also hear Wolf Alice's "Don't Delete The Kisses" — one of the more quietly influential songs of the past decade — and ABBA on the outro. But I also, of course, hear Rodrigo herself, particularly in the songwriting. She's still great at devising instantly memorable ways to express breathless emotion ("You're looking like an angel on the walls of Versailles"), deploy a sly pickup line (comparing her instant attraction to "feminine intuition"), and ensure that at least one lyric will be clipped and shared absolutely everywhere. I guarantee that right now, as you read this, at least one Gemini is nurturing a crush on a Pisces for the sole purpose of making this song theirs. (Which is a very Gemini thing to do.)
Teddy Swims - "Mr. Know It All"
Teddy Swims' latest single is not a Kelly Clarkson cover, but an invitation to open up his already large fanbase to all the people -- and this is probably quite a few people -- who might get on board if he were just a little less extra. What does a less-extra Teddy Swims sound like? Gotye, apparently. The plinking intro is right out of "Somebody That I Used to Know," as is the wistfulness Teddy's still got his tenor, too, and he puts it to good harmonizing use on the outro.
Lady Gaga & Doechii - "Runway"
Fifteen years after Madonna shaded Gaga for "Born This Way" veering a little close to "Express Yourself," Gaga has now done it again with a single that veers close to "Vogue." The difference is that "Born This Way" was an event single of colossal proportions, and "Runway" is a tie-in for The Devil Wears Prada 2. It has an unassailable excuse for sounding like "Vogue" — that's the whole assignment! The song has Doechii, too, and it lets her do the strutting while Gaga provides the diva-vocal backup track.
Madonna - "I Feel So Free"
(Warning: Strobing lights above. A lot of them.)
The woman herself has her own single out, too. Given the variable quality of Madonna's past 20 years, she's decided to revert her sound to its last known great version: Confessions On A Dance Floor. And she's doing it properly: Confessions II (no word on an Usher feature) reunites her with its predecessor's main producer, Stuart Price.
Price's recently worked on Future Nostalgia and That! Feels Good!, and he's in top form with a moody, immersive, almost meditative dance track that would be good no matter what he and Madonna put over it. But if you needed more evidence that pop is in its doomer era, here's Madonna, perhaps the most unassailably confident presence in music, experiencing an identity crisis on the dance floor. And while the dancefloor-as-sanctuary trope has existed as long as dancefloors have, here you really feel what Madonna's seeking sanctuary from, as she intones spoken-word interludes about trusting no one and losing touch with herself, and scans the crowd not for love, or even lust exactly, but "safety in numbers."
(That being said, I just have to say it: Madonna's speaking voice sounds like this. It doesn't sound like whatever's going on here. I've relistened to this so often trying to reverse-engineer her vocals: The most extensive production tinkering in recent memory? An AI trained on her voice? An AI trained on the bridge of Dannii Minogue's "I Begin To Wonder"? It is a mystery; I guess I'll just have to keep relistening to this.)
Tiffany Day - "EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WANTED"
Even more evidence that Slayyyter's album is tapping into something real and resonant: fellow hyperpop-adjacent breakout Tiffany Day's new single is called "Everything I've Ever Wanted" but about disowning it all. But you'd have to read a lyrics sheet to know that, because the single is otherwise one of the most exuberant of the year. It reaches two apotheoses of bliss: once early on, as Day's vocals mass into a hyperpop choir and ascend to heaven; and again at the midway point, with a drop of fallen-angel proportions.
Cortis - "REDRED"
K-pop boy band Cortis delivers a single all about one thing: that sequencer grinding away in the background. Actually, it's about two things: that, and the way the boys' vocals soar and roar and leave vocoder trails behind them, like they're doing skywriting.
Six Sex - "Not Ur Mom"
A single for the immature 13-year-old in all of us, or maybe just me. Argentine artist Francisca Agustina Cuello, whose stage persona was described by Remezcla as her "hentai avatar," releases an obnoxious banger that has it all: "ur mom" in the title, noticeably farty backing vocals right from the start, sound effects reminiscent of the "penis music" meme, and a lyric that translates to "even though you sucked my tits, I'm not your mom." That, and another awesome sequencer.
Haute & Freddy - "Fields Of Versailles"
We've almost got the whole palace this month! Songwriters Michelle Buzz and Lance Shipp — the latter of whom cowrote the intriguingly bizarre French-language Britney bonus track "Coupure Électrique" — give the Cyndi-ish "Fields Of Versailles" all the theatrical camp that the title demands.
Pierre de Maere - "Je pense à vous"
After an extremely frantic couple of songs, let's bring down the pulse. Pierre de Maere, already a breakout artist in France and his native Belgium, got another boost from his guest spot on "These Walls" from Dua Lipa's Radical Optimism. (Don't remember that one? It was an alternate version, which charted mostly in Belgium.) He's apparently going for a Sombr thing in the video — quoth one YouTube commenter, "I’m obsessed with the new age dandy boy that you are" — and going for a sophistipop thing in the song itself, full of flourishes: chillout piano interludes, funk guitar, and falling-star SFX everywhere.
Momo Boyd - "Oops"
And here longtime Roc Nation signee Momo Boyd — her group Infinity Song's been on the label since 2016 — lends her silky alto to one of the most exquisitely R&B tracks of the year so far: a song to sink into.
