Background and career
Catherine Grace Garner (born September 17, 1996), known professionally as Slayyyter, is an American singer and songwriter. Known for her brash and sex-positive lyricism and electropop production, she started with independently releasing songs through SoundCloud. Her debut mixtape, Slayyyter, was independently released in 2019. Her debut album, Troubled Paradise, was released in June 2021, followed by her second album, Starfucker, in September 2023. Her third album, Worst Girl in America, was released in March 2026 through Columbia and Records Label, and achieved breakout success. In addition to four solo tours, Slayyyter has toured in support of Charli XCX, Kesha, and Tove Lo.
Slayyyter is from Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb west of St. Louis, where she has "kind of lived [her] whole life". She has gone by her middle name "Grace" since childhood. Her mother is a devout Polish American Catholic; however, she was not a strict parent. Her childhood was affected by her father's alcoholism and drug addiction. She described her parents as having a "toxic" relationship while she was growing up, and Slayyyter has been estranged from her father since childhood. Her mother introduced her to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson, Michael Jackson, and Elton John; the latter inspired her future costumes. Slayyyter's maternal grandfather gifted her with her first turntable, on which she started listening to records from her mother's collection. Slayyyter aspired to be a movie star, a singer, or a comedian on Saturday Night Live as a child. She took ballet and hip-hop dance lessons until high school, when her family could no longer afford them. She went to a small Catholic school in St. Louis until eighth grade. In middle school, Slayyyter and her friends performed "Push it to the Limit" by Corbin Bleu for a talent show, marking her first public performance. As a child, she would watch the I Am... World Tour and Lady Gaga Presents the Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden tour DVDs "religiously," memorizing Lady Gaga and Beyoncé's choreography. Slayyyter later attended Kirkwood High School, where she was "offered great music classes for the first time." There, she was in an a capella choir, took voice lessons, performed concert solos, and was a member of the Kirkwood swim team. Slayyyter said that her involvement in the arts helped her avoid using hard drugs like heroin, which many of her classmates took and frequently overdosed on, sometimes resulting in fatalities. Slayyyter's favorite classes were English, film studies, and art, but she struggled with other subjects. Having grown up without money, she often felt insecure around wealthy classmates. Slayyyter first became involved in stoner culture in high school, and smoked cannabis regularly with her friends. She listened to pop artists, went to concerts regularly, including Marina and the Diamonds, Lana Del Rey, and Charli XCX, and found community through Tumblr. Slayyyter studied at the University of Missouri in Columbia for about a year. She feels it was an "expensive experiment" in which she began a career as a musician, making "'80s lo-fi pop" which she produced and edited herself out of her bedroom closet, but never published. She dropped out of college in 2016 and continued to create music while working as a hair salon receptionist in Des Peres, camming, and doing findomme work to make money. She said it was her e-girl "hustler" phase.
Garner began going by the moniker "Slayyyter" as a spin on the last name of character Ron Slater, from Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (1993). She chose the name so that she could have the same username on all social media platforms. She later said that most of her early fans were Charli XCX stan accounts. Retroactively, she likened the iteration of her persona to a Britney Spears impersonation. Slayyyter contacted her most frequent early collaborator, Ayesha Erotica, on Twitter, where they both developed a following. Slayyyter credits Stan Twitter users for introducing her to Erotica, discovering Erotica's music after a fan said they looked similar. Erotica sent Slayyyter a music demo which became Slayyyter's debut single "BFF". The song was then released on SoundCloud in 2018, featuring Erotica as a collaborator. Slayyyter also met collaborator That Kid through Twitter during the same period. Slayyyter has since criticized the body shaming and scrutiny she experienced from fans on X.
In early 2019, a 15-second snippet of Slayyyter's song "Mine" went viral on Twitter, and was later released on Valentine's Day. The Stan Twitter success of "Mine" and the later single "Daddy AF" allowed her to leave her job as a hair salon receptionist and pursue music full time. Slayyyter said that as she began recording music, men in the industry treated her "weirdly" and "inappropriately" because of her songs' sexual content and her history as a sex worker. The men she referenced have been fired by their labels. In June 2019, Slayyyter embarked on her sold-out debut tour, entitled "The Mini Tour" in support of her first few singles. The tour began on June 24 in Brooklyn, New York and concluded on July 27 in St. Louis. On September 17, 2019, Slayyyter released her debut mixtape, Slayyyter, which combined dance-pop and hyperpop production. "Daddy AF", from the mixtape, was later featured in two films: Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) and Anora (2024). In October 2019, Slayyyter opened for Charli XCX's Charli Live Tour, after being featured on a "No Boys" remix of "Click" with Charli XCX and Kim Petras. In December 2019, fans revealed Slayyyter had made a series of tweets containing racial slurs through a Fifth Harmony stan account in 2012 and 2013. She apologized and said, "I have grown and changed so much in the past eight years and the person I am today is not who I was at age 15. Eight years is a lot of time to reflect, grow, mature and better yourself as a human being... I know that being young or uneducated about the matter also does not excuse any of these things, but please know that people do change." Slayyyter committed funds resulting from her CD and vinyl sales to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Black Trans Travel Fund—two charities benefitting black trans youth.
During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Slayyyter was meeting with producers in Los Angeles. Unable to leave due to travel bans, she purchased an apartment in Beverly Hills, California and continued to make music during the quarantine period. These recordings later contributed to her debut album, Troubled Paradise. Slayyyter released a remix of Britney Spears' "Gimme More" to SoundCloud in April 2020. On January 26, 2021, Heidi Montag confirmed via Twitter that she would be featured on a remix of the track. However, in a 2023 interview with VICE, Slayyyter confirmed the collaboration would not be released due to a "sample clearance issue", revealing that the sample was "crazy expensive to clear". In May 2024, Slayyyter said that she had tried to clear the sample for release but the song's original writers would not comply with her team. In 2026, she said that it "wouldn't make sense to put (the song) out now" and that the original sample would still be difficult to clear. In October and November 2020, she released the songs "Self Destruct" and "Throatzillaaa", respectively. On January 21, 2021, she announced her debut studio album, Troubled Paradise, which was set to be released on June 11. The third single from the album, "Troubled Paradise" released along with its music video the next day. From February to May 2021, she released the singles "Clouds", "Cowboys", and "Over This!" ahead of the album. Troubled Paradise was released on June 11, 2021, through Fader Label. Pitchfork's Ashley Bardhan called the project "vibrant and ridiculous". Slayyyter promoted the album by releasing Vevo Live performances for the tracks 'Letters' and 'Troubled Paradise'. On November 5, 2021, she released the standalone single "Stupid Boy", a dance-pop song featuring Big Freedia. Later in 2021, she released Inferno Euphoria, an EP of remixes from Troubled Paradise.
On October 4, 2022, Tove Lo announced that Slayyyter would be the opening act on the North American leg of Lo's Dirt Femme Tour. Slayyyter also teased new music in her own announcement. On June 9, 2023, Slayyyter released the synth-pop single "Out of Time", which Nylon called a "sleek" return after Troubled Paradise. On July 20, she announced her second studio album, Starfucker, "Out of Time" serving as its lead single. The next day, the album's second single "Miss Belladonna" came out. On August 14, she announced the third single from Starfucker, "Erotic Electronic". The music video for the single was released on August 17, and the single was released on August 18. Slayyyter released Starfucker on September 22, 2023, later putting out a deluxe edition of the album on December 1. The conventional electropop and dance-pop style of the album deviated from the hyperpop sound of her previous releases. It was her first charting album, debuting at No. 17 on Billboard's Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart and reached No. 10. The album was positive reviewed by critics, with several considering it one of 2023's best. Promoting the album, Slayyyter embarked on the Club Valentine Tour, 17 shows in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Ireland beginning on October 25, 2023, in Boston and concluded on February 17, 2024, in London. As part of Spotify's "Spotify Singles" series, Slayyyter released a cover of Lady Gaga's song "Monster" on October 17, 2023. On a separate but related occasion in early 2024, Gaga commented that she "loved" a TikTok video of Slayyyter lip-syncing to her unreleased song "Brooklyn Nights". Later in April 2026, Slayyyter said that the financial failure of the Club Valentine tour and its corresponding merchandise campaign led her to reconsider her career and begin making Worst Girl in America, intending for it to be her last studio album. In July 2024, after performing at the Melt Festival in Gräfenhainichen, Germany, she traveled to Santa Margherita Ligure and Portofino, Italy eating oysters which contained vibrio bacteria. She then had a seizure, became paralyzed from the waist down, and was transported to the hospital in an ambulance. She had a quick recovery and continued touring the next day. On September 20, 2024, she released the single "No Comma". According to Slayyyter, "No Comma" was a blueprint for the sound of future album Worst Girl in America, and was inspired by Miami culture and M.I.A.'s album Maya (2010). The artist considered releasing "No Comma" as a part of a reloaded version of her 2019 mixtape Slayyyter. In October 2024, Slayyyter hosted a DJ set in Washington, D.C. for Boiler Room, at which she performed a song which became "Broke Bitch Freestyle", released during the Worst Girl in America album cycle. In July 2025, she threw the first pitch at a St. Louis Cardinals home game. In summer 2025, after releasing the "girl power" single "Attention!" with Kesha and Rose Gray, the trio toured together on the Tits Out Tour.
