There's something about seeing an artist, live, who is on the precipice of superstardom. You can feel it in the simmering crowd. An overheard gasp or squeal. Two friends catching each other’s eye, hands clasped tightly between them; cheeks pinned permanently into a grin.
This was the impassioned energy of Slayyyter's show at Sydney's Enmore Theatre on a drizzling Sunday night – the first stop her on Australian tour, and her first performance since a mega-watt Lollapalooza set last weekend (one that drew more than 50,000 people at Grant Park in Chicago – and saw her upgraded to the festival's main stage).
The American singer, born Catherine Grace Garner, borrowed her alias from Ron Slater, the perpetually stoned character in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Originally styled simply as ‘Slater’, it eventually became ‘Slayyyter’ – an escalation that now feels strangely prescient. Following a packed Mojave Stage set at Coachella in April, her trajectory has become markedly steeper. But don't get it twisted – she's no instant success. The New York Times recently described her as “an overnight sensation 10 years in the making”. And her March 2026 album, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, was conceived, at least in part, as a farewell project. Instead, it debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Dance Albums chart.
By the time we enter the swell of bodies gathered across the Art Deco theatre’s ground floor, the room has already become its own kind of spectacle. We find a position near the front left of the stage and I immediately give myself over to people-watching: bunny ears and fur coats, trucker hats and corsets, looks assembled with the kind of commitment only few artists procure.
I strike up a conversation with our standing neighbours (hello to Stella and her friends from Adelaide) wearing DIY-ed Slayyyter merchandise they’ve painstakingly bedazzled during an all-nighter the day prior. They tell me they've been fans since Slayyyter’s self-titled mixtape arrived in 2019. Stella has emblazoned her purse with the words ‘I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS’, a reference to one of her favourite songs. She tells me she’s driven up from Canberra for the show, then casually mentions the Enmore’s reputation for having its floor cave in during particularly rowdy sets. Tonight, she suggests, might be one to watch.
Raising hell is, after all, central to the Slayyyter ethos. And as soon as the lights dim and the pulsating opening synth of now-viral DANCE... begin to play, thundering with bass, the crowd becomes a carnal scene. Bass reverberates underfoot. When she appears – dressed in her signature trucker hat and ripped Daisy Dukes – a roar comes from the room that catches me off guard.
From there, she barely allows the room to settle. OLD FLING$ gives way to OLD TECHNOLOGY, then BROKE BITCH FREE$TYLE, before the first stretch of the set barrels towards CRANK: a fiendish modern party anthem that sends the floor into disarray. The opening act is almost confrontational in its pace, each track folding into the next before the crowd has had time to recover from the last. There are no obvious concessions to restraint.
From there, the show unfolded across three acts, partitioned by Slayyyter’s retreats into a house built into the set behind her, complete with curtained windows. Each time she disappeared inside, another vision re-emerged.
For Act II, the transformation is pointedly feminine: a frilled skirt and silk robe knotted at the waist to reveal a rhinestoned bra. Perched atop a vintage carousel horse, she turns towards the album’s more bruised interior. GAS STATION and I THINK HE’S GOT A GIRL trade the first act’s punch for heartbreak, jealousy and romantic paranoia, before I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS pulls the room back towards something more acerbic.
It’s this ability to move between personas – whether trashy and immaculate, wounded and imperious, knowingly ridiculous and entirely sincere – that makes the architecture of her music work so well. Slayyyter is a pop star that also understands pop spectacle. She understands the pleasure of artifice: the outfit changes, the house, the carousel horse, the exaggerated archetypes. Nothing asks to be mistaken for naturalism – except for a piercing vocal that is one of the most visceral and powerful I've heard from a pop performer in a while. There's no mistaking her raw voice for autotune or an overzealous playback track.
By the third act, the night moves inevitably towards its release. The encore began with BRAND NEW CHANEL$. Released only weeks earlier, its slower, 90s-inflected techno pulse carries an unexpectedly triumphant quality live. Then came BEAT UP CHANEL$, one of Slayyyter's defining singles and the frenzied gut-punch. The floor, for the record, holds.
