Slayyyter has always known what she was doing, even when the critical establishment was not sure what to make of her. “Wor$t Girl In America” is the album where she stops waiting for permission and just burns the whole thing down.

The record is dense with references to the underbelly of American pop culture, the kind of images you find in tabloids and straight-to-streaming thrillers, and Slayyyter routes all of it through a production aesthetic that splits the difference between hyperpop maximalism and something approaching genuine craft. There are moments here that sound like what Britney Spears might have made if she had been given creative control from day one. There are other moments that sound like nothing else you have heard this year.

The songwriting has sharpened considerably. Earlier Slayyyter releases were more interested in attitude than execution, which worked for what they were but left you wondering whether the music could hold up if the novelty wore off. “Wor$t Girl In America” answers that question with something close to conviction. The hooks are real. The arrangements have texture. The lyrics, which lean into a kind of trashy American mythology, are funnier and more self-aware than they first appear.

“Rotten Apple” opens the record with a distorted country-pop sample and immediately signals that we are somewhere different from her earlier work. “Princess of Darkness” leans into goth theatrics without becoming a parody of them. The title track is genuinely great, a chorus that buries itself in your head and refuses to leave.

The album is not perfect. A few tracks in the middle sag slightly, and there are moments where the maximalism becomes its own kind of clutter. But the ratio of hits to misses is better than anything Slayyyter has released before, and the overall vision is coherent in a way that her previous work rarely was.

NME called it “pop that finds salvation in the underbelly of American cinema,” which is about right. What they did not say is that salvation, in Slayyyter’s hands, looks like sequins and chaos and a very loud chorus at exactly the right moment. “Wor$t Girl In America” is the best argument she has yet made that she deserves to be taken seriously, which is probably the most Slayyyter thing imaginable.