Three albums in, Slayyyter has stopped hedging. WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, out March 27 on Columbia Records, is the most focused thing she has ever made, which is a strange thing to say about a 14-track record that moves like a carnival ride through pop, punk, and early 2000s trash culture. But focus is not the same as restraint. Slayyyter knows exactly what she is doing here and does it without apology.

The premise is simple enough. She went back to St. Louis. Not physically, but mentally, emotionally. She dug into the people she grew up with, the aesthetics of her adolescence, the specific kind of girl who was everywhere in small-city America in the early 2000s and who popular culture spent years either ignoring or mocking. The result is an album that treats that world with genuine affection while also being bracingly sharp about its limitations.

“Beat Up Chanels” lands early and sets the tone. It is not subtle. It is not trying to be. The production, which skews toward fizzy, overdriven synths and beats that feel lifted from a forgotten mid-2000s playlist, has a deliberate tackiness that Slayyyter deploys like a weapon. She has always been good at this, at taking sounds that critics reflexively dismiss and making them feel urgent and strange.

“Cannibalism!” is the one that will outlast the album cycle. It is vicious in a way that only comes from actual experience, a breakup song dressed up as something funnier and more violent than a breakup song has any right to be. “Crank” swings in the opposite direction, almost meditative despite the tempo, as if she took a breath before the final push.

The album falters slightly in the back half, where a few tracks feel like they are filling out the tracklist rather than adding to the argument. Not badly, but the momentum that carries the first eight songs through starts to dissipate around track 11. It is a minor complaint about a record that is, on balance, a genuinely good time and then some.

What separates WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA from her earlier work is not sonic ambition, which she has always had, but emotional honesty. The self-awareness that sometimes kept previous albums at arm’s length is gone. She lets the feelings in without softening them first. It is a harder trick than it looks, especially in a mode this deliberately heightened, and she pulls it off.

The tour is coming in September. If the live show matches what is on this record, it will be one of the more entertaining things happening this year in the general vicinity of pop music. This is an artist who has figured out what she is for.