The proudly campy hyperpop singer’s debut is vibrant and ridiculous, for better or worse.
In the world of 24-year-old glitch-pop artist Slayyyter, the Juicy Couture lockets sway to the booming bass, celebrities from 2004 are ancient deities, and when you sing along, you should sound like Britney. In 2018, between shifts as a salon receptionist, the Missouri native began posting tracks on SoundCloud with help from Ayesha Erotica, a prolific hyperpop producer who scrubbed her work from the internet in 2018. Their music was half-joking and brashly sexual, stuffing lyrics about white Jeeps, kissing strangers, and feeling “daddy as fuck” between burping bass and synth flourishes sharp enough to pop a White Claw. Slayyyter’s SoundCloud singles coalesced into the self-released 2019 mixtape Slayyyter, a deep-fried pop delicacy that landed her on Charli XCX’s tour. She seemed poised for a breakthrough—but when offensive old tweets resurfaced in early 2020, fans weren’t so sure she deserved it.
Troubled Paradise, Slayyyter’s full-length debut, seeks to recapture some of that flagging momentum. The album is vibrant and ridiculous, its lyrics silly and captivating (“All these vegan bitches want beef!”), but even at its most high-fructose and helium-inflated, the music can’t conceal its own shallowness. Still, it tries hard, sometimes scrounging up flashes of gold. The title track is Slayyyter’s shot at soaring, heart-pounding electropop, and although its four-minute length feels gratuitous, the bittersweet lovesickness is locked in. “Throatzillaaa” is a sultry blowjob anthem (hear me out); Slayyyter sounds completely serious as she declares in bubble-bath Auto-Tune, “Baby, let me swallow them kids.” Funny, hooky, and over-the-top sex-positive, it’s a prime example of her ability to deliver tackiness with endearing nonchalance.
Slayyyter was an early adopter of the internet’s current preoccupation with 2000s-era bimbos and relishes in that kind of camp. She treats pop-culture excess with the reverence of a historian, mentioning Nickelodeon’s Timmy Turner in the same line where she talks about doing coke. Far from the detached femmebot you might imagine singing these songs, Slayyyter’s face and body are constantly present: slithering out of a hellishly pink tanning bed on her mixtape cover, or moaning against the greenscreen in the orange desert of her “Cowboys” video. Her tabloid-ready outfits and hyper-saturated music videos are impossible to separate from her music—they all inform each other.
But that audacious image and sound haven’t advanced any further than where she left them on Slayyyter. Songs like the unpleasantly frizzy “Over This!” and the monotonous “Dog House,” an uninspired copycat of Azealia Banks’ “212,” sound like they could have been B-sides from the earlier tape. Slayyyter doesn’t lean into her persona the way Lana Del Rey does, or shift it into something multidimensional and theatric like Dorian Electra, either. It’s just kind of... there.
When she first debuted on SoundCloud, “hyperpop” hadn’t yet become a genre movement. Slayyyter channeled the most maligned hot girls of 2008 with grimy glitz and neon glare, her own attempt to mold the gushy, processed sound of PC Music back towards something resembling the mainstream. It’s an artistic trajectory shared with artists like Bladee, Poppy, and Kim Petras, but Slayyyter—unfiltered, unpolished, and proudly, performatively trashy—was different enough to distinguish herself from other hyperpop disciples with Hot 100 aspirations. Perhaps they were afraid to be truly crude, to whip out the velour track pants and soak them at the wet T-shirt contest. Slayyyter knew how to turn grossness into glamour, or at the very least, into the best song for crushing blue raspberry vodka shots with six of your closest The Real World fans.
More recently, as pop culture reevaluates its relationship to the Courtney Stoddens and Megan Foxes of the world, Slayyyter’s teeny bikinis and hair flips aren’t quite enough to make her appear more interesting than other Y2K-loving hyperpop acts. Projects like Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now draw on hyperpop’s capacity for emotional depth and play, using the genre’s characteristic lack of restraint as a vehicle to explore personal truths. Slayyyter has trouble getting there; her jabs at vulnerability never make it past stiff cliché (“I don’t want to think/Pour another drink”). Her star quality has supernova potential if she just allowed herself to dig deeper—bimbos have brains, too.
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