Slayyyter Wants to Make Music That Scares You

Backstage at Governors Ball this month, Slayyyter wasn’t unwinding from her set with obvious pop choices. During a casual phone shuffle for a Rolling Stone feature, what surfaced was a listening diet built on hardcore outbursts, psychedelic dread, and the kind of severe sounds most artists only flirt with. The moment was offhand, but it mapped a deliberate shift in her own work.

She started quiet—Jake Bugg’s “Country Song” as music for solitary, rainy nights—then veered abruptly. Portishead’s “Threads,” from 2008’s Third, she called “hectic,” its outro something that “freaks me out.” That unease is exactly what she’s chasing. “The music I’m working on now, I want it to feel scarier and creepy and wrong and off-putting,” she said.

The picks kept escalating. Mannequin Pussy’s “Romantic” earned praise for its soft-to-extreme dynamics; their 2024 track “I Got Heaven” was a “great summer song” that turns from hallucinogenic swirls into screaming. Turnstile, a hardcore band she’s seen at both the Shrine and Coachella, she admires for pushing their genre outward. And the smaller California quartet Niis, fronted by Emily Sando-Brown—someone Slayyyter calls “so cool, so hot and so talented”—provided the ideal gym anthem in “Fuck You Boy.”

When asked what of her own music fits a playlist, she deadpanned: “Crank” from her new album Worst Girl in America, suitable for weddings, graduations, and a grandmother’s 90th. The joke landed, but the shuffle had already made the serious point. Slayyyter isn’t borrowing energy from heavier scenes just for edge. She’s internalizing their logic, ready to inject her pop with something that startles.