i am a semi-retired party girl and have completely lost my mind over the new Slayyyter album

This morning, I sipped a cup of delicious coffee from a DFA Records mug. When the pandemic happened, I decided to improve my homemade coffee game once and for all, so now I do the freshly ground beans and the weighed measurements and all that stuff. I got up at 6:30am to get some shit in the house together before getting my baby up and ready for daycare. As I puttered, my wonderful cat slept in the baby bouncer he has commandeered as his own, his tail politely curled around his round fluffy butt.

A domestic scene, a quiet scene. I enjoy my current life. My current life is also diametrically opposed to the life I led not too long ago. This former life involved flashing lights, sticky floors, and the sickly sweet scent of Red Bull. Buying rounds of shots. Charming the bartender into playing "I Feel Love." Staying up nattering on and on with old music videos on in the background until daylight broke. Being the kind of person who sometimes heard birdsong at the absolutely wrong time.

I was thinking about my former life and current life because the new Slayyyter album WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA crushed me to death. The album is pure messy party girl music: lyrics about "doing drugs tonight / ones that I'm not prescribed" and getting "so gay off that tequila," and nasty synths designed to rip the faceflesh off your skull like a low-quality shot of liquor. Last year Charli XCX brought cocaine pop back to the fore, but she also was working through anxiety and grief, and the music often slowed or chilled out to accompany those emotions. Slayyter, who is bottle blonde and puffy-lipped and 29 years old, keeps the intensity high and takes the themes back to basics: sex, alcohol, drugs, money, and saying things like "I didn't step off the train tonight to get mean-mugged in the club by some ugly bitches."

It has been a while since we had a pop girl committed to going so damn hard. Nick Sylvester wrote in a smartdumb newsletter that "there is a difference between records made to perform well inside a club and records that are made to sound like they are a record being played inside a club," and categorized Brat as the latter. I think WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA would perform well inside a club! Though it is shaped like a pop album, the production is often much closer to Skrillex or Justice than it is to Max Martin or Jack Antonoff. It would sound as great at EDC as it would in a store that sells pleather shorts to 20-year-olds.

The platform boot stomp of "I'M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS," the demonic chorus of "YES GODDD," the distorted hooting and hollering on "CRANK"...all of it evokes the kind of substance-fueled oblivion I remember well. Partying hard was always a pastime more than a lifestyle for me, but when the opportunities presented themselves, I took them seriously. The goal, always, was to alter my consciousness enough to alter reality. Achieve enough internal stimulation, balance it out with external stimulation, and crazy shit could start happening. Weird existential conversations, Kylie Jenner-style 'realizations' on the dance floor, access to premium gossip, maybe even a powerful molecular connection to the consciousness of all of humanity, or something.

My favorite song on the album* is "BEAT UP CHANEL$," a techno pop banger in which Slayyyter makes a wish list of things she wants/needs/deserves, including champagne, vintage Celine clothing, "the stickiest weed," and a cigarette. Slayyyter delivers her list of desires in two different ways. The first time around, she barks bossily over a distorted bassline and a classic rickety EDM beat build. The second time, she sings wistfully over haunted synths that drop out the way your stomach does when the roll kicks in. The shouted version of the chorus is aspirational, grabby, hungry. The sung version is a little sad. It almost sounds like Slayyyter knows she's already capable of getting everything she wants, and at the same time knows it's never quite going to be enough.

The last items on her list besides "beat-up Chanels" (whose meaning I choose to read as "being of a social station that you can own designer goods and treat them like shit because they aren't even that precious to you") was "something for real." Her dreamy I want something for real hit me like a truck. That was always my goal, the dream of a great night out: something for real. Meeting strangers, getting to know friends better, having some kind of experience that cannot happen when everyone's all buttoned up and full of daylight decorum, something that you can remember forever and maybe even changes you somehow.

A few years ago I was in Atlantic City with a big group of people. Bluetooth speaker hotel pregame, little black dress, competing flavors of Juul vapor. We went to this ridiculous club with a pool in it, where drunk people were twerking in bikinis and the televisions hanging over all the bars were playing the Home Shopping Network. I was pretty cranked, and on the dance floor I accidentally spilled some vodka soda on a nearby girl; I was expecting her to be upset, but instead of yelling at me (which would be well within her rights), she silently poured some of her vodka soda into my cup. We started chatting—names, hometowns, Reasons For Partying Tonight—then drifted apart.

A while later, my husband pointed her out, alone on a couch on the second-floor lounge, sobbing. I went over to investigate. What happened, girl? She said she had just caught her boyfriend making out with another girl. This was wild. This was reality television show drama, only it was happening right in front of me. Suddenly I found myself hugging a sobbing girl I'd only met an hour before, Pitbull or some similar artist blaring from the speakers downstairs. And it made all the sense in the world to be doing such a thing at the time. When she'd calmed down, I bought us shots of tequila and then she went off to find her actual friends. I will never forget her. The thing about partying is that it can shrink, often instantly, the kind of default distance between two humans that usually only gets shrunk by time and continued care and maintenance.

I cannot live that lifestyle anymore, and probably won't for a good long while. Instead, I am up with the birds and do not fear them. I haven't met a ton of strangers out and about recently, and I miss that sometimes. But the weird thing about having a baby is that she changes constantly—sometimes daily—and that makes her, in a way, a stranger I get to meet over and over again. A stranger who happens to be made of goo, with a shockingly dense head covered in fine apricot fuzz, rather than a fellow party girl in a polyester top, but still. Regardless, I have listened to WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA every day since it came out, letting the deranged music rattle my bones, blowing very gently on the glowing embers of my inner party girl. I still want something for real, and I always will.

[*A runner-up shout to "UNKNOWN LOVERZ," a calmer and sweeter track which sounds like a bloghouse "Lovefool," or Lana Del Rey fronting Phoenix, both of which are things I didn't know I needed. I think "UNKNOWN LOVERZ is a hit.]

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