Trash hits! Why a wave of hedonistic, feral female pop stars are rejecting respectability
In a collapsing world, artists like Slayyyter and Cobrah are chasing extreme highs with hyperactive music and debauched lyrics. Is their trashy vibe emancipating – or a bit contrived?
If any year demanded a soundtrack of self-aggrandising female mayhem, it’s 2026. Amid the terrors of war, AI and the climate crisis, women are expected to be symbolic vessels of order and stability: thin, beautiful and perpetually 25 – a state of perfection newly available for purchase thanks to weight-loss drugs and the deep plane facelift.
Covered unironically in leopard print and rhinestones, a cohort of young female pop stars are defying this familiar con with brash electronic pop, shamelessly hedonistic lyrics, anarchic sexuality and an obsession with what was once dismissed as “white trash”. It’s an aesthetic embraced by performers such as Slayyyter, Kim Petras, Cobrah, Demi Lovato, Snow Strippers’ Tatiana Schwaninger, Tove Lo and returning scene godmother Kesha.
On I’m Your Girl Right, the lead single from her new album Estrus, Lo sings “We fuck all night on Ritalin-lin-lin-lin”. Slayyyter, meanwhile, describes herself as a “too drunk, trashy St Louis girl … extensions showing … looking kinda crazy”. Thong, a recent single by rising London-based musician Amara ctk100, celebrates barely-there pants (the artwork centres a thong visibly rising above the waistband of a skirt) and a fake-it-till-you-make-it lifestyle: “Benz outside / Oh no, I lied.”
“Part of this feels like an extension of post-lockdown nihilism,” says Ione Gamble, editor of the forthcoming essay collection The Polyester Book of (Bad) Taste. “Things are so bad in a political context that we may as well have fun.”
What sets this apart from previous moments of hard-partying recession pop is its reckless main character energy and invigorating rejection of feminine respectability. “The older I get, the more intense the pressure gets around being a ‘good woman’, and that mould feels so boring,” says Lo, who is 38. “There’s a confidence in not doing everything perfectly.”
Five years ago, sad-girl bedroom singer-songwriters such as Olivia Rodrigo and Holly Humberstone resonated with a generation spending their formative years in lockdown. Once the pandemic lifted, gen Z reclaimed feckless post-9/11 underground culture as “indie sleaze” and partied through the rubble of their own wrecked prospects. In came smudged eyeliner, shredded tights and the return of electroclash thanks to artists including the Dare and Fcukers.
That 00s sound is “definitely influencing music right now,” says Lo. She celebrates its “rawness and roughness”, which she thinks stemmed from “people not giving a fuck because they’re not being filmed” in an idyllic pre-cameraphone age. “That need to revolt against the norm is building inside us like a pressure cooker. The aggressive ‘getting punched in the face while I scream’ sonic landscape of Slayyyter’s song Crank makes that possible.”
In 2026, the influence of those scenes has mutated into sleazy electro-pop – from throbbing drum’n’bass to hyperactive EDM – delivered with rock-star energy and rap-influenced vocals. The production is aggressively maximalist, all grubby guitars, blown-out synths and addictive hooks. Meanwhile, its energy is rooted in impulsive, raunchy mid-00s US culture: MTV’s Spring Break, Britney with the brakes off, and the proliferation of online porn and reality TV (often both at once, in shows such as Girls of the Playboy Mansion).
Spilling out from Hollywood’s gay club scene, old pop songs by reality TV stars once dismissed as tacky – by the likes of Paris Hilton, Heidi Montag, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Erika Jayne – have been reclaimed as trash-pop ur-texts. Whether it’s Slayyyter screaming “I’m actually kinda famous” or Kim Petras flashing a Louis Vuitton bag and hard cash in her Freak It video, these stars are evoking a time when the rules of celebrity were changing and, for some, fame offered a diamante-encrusted ladder out of poverty.
You can hear early traces of the trash sound in the grimy raunch of early 00s electroclash icon Peaches and the knowing rap-influenced provocations of Princess Superstar, whose 2005 single Perfect had a gen Z-fuelled revival after it was used in Saltburn. Trash-pop was distilled in the mid-2000s Hollywood party scene, when figures such as EDM godfather Skrillex would party next to Hilton, a mix that inspired Porcelain Black. Then a teenage transplant to LA from Detroit, she was making a raucous mix of electro-pop and industrial club music with lyrics about being king of the world and “fucking like a star”. It got her signed to Virgin, who, she says, then panicked about her abrasive attitude and tried to push her into being “something like Avril Lavigne”. Black refused to comply and defied the label by uploading her songs to Myspace, earning millions of plays. “People dream of doing numbers like that online now,” she says.
But it wasn’t long before the music industry realised how lucrative this archetype was: in 2009, Kesha’s rambunctious debut single Tik Tok chimed with post-financial crisis nihilism and she was crowned the queen of pop excess. Last year, Slayyyter and Kesha collaborated with British producer Rose Gray on the club banger Attention! “My music would not exist without Kesha,” Slayyter has said.
Two years ago, Charli xcx’s Brat re-energised pop with hedonistic club energy, opening the cultural garbage chute for trash-pop to flow through. “Charli is an instigator and not a reactor,” says Lo. “Her sound is so infectious it’s impossible for it not to seep into everything new.” “It touched a nerve in the zeitgeist,” adds Slayyyter producer Kyle Shearer. “It hits, it feels good.”
Since Brat was her sixth album, Charli also offered a career blueprint for Slayyyter, whose third album, Wor$t Girl in America, swapped Hollywood glam for denim hotpants and trucker hats, and finally gave her the pop breakthrough she had been pursuing since 2018. By the time Slayyyter played to a huge crowd at Coachella this year, she had become one of US pop’s most talked-about artists. Charlie Harding, co-host of the podcast Switched on Pop, says the album represented “Slayyyter going for broke, her last-ditch effort. Pop music often rewards the thing which feels most authentically that person.”
Even if mainstream audiences have just caught on, the high camp, unapologetic brashness and full-frontal sexuality of trash pop has always attracted a huge LGBTQ+ audience – and artists from the community including Slayyyter, Petras, Swedish star Cobrah and US hyperpop rapper and producer (and early Slayyyter collaborator) Ayesha Erotica have been making this kind of music for years.
Off the back of this moment, Cobrah is now getting broader recognition for her aggressive, sexually charged club music, and was asked by Demi Lovato to feature on her new song Fantasy. Many of Cobrah’s songs – the industrial, icy Brand New Bitch, the hedonistic Good Puss – are about chasing extreme highs. “Everything else just feels very lame and tame,” she says. By leaning harder into her sexuality in her lyricism, she says, “I’ve become more like myself. The opposite of diluted: concentrated.”
Harding suggests that by revelling in hedonism, these artists are “straddling stereotypes of women being unhinged and hysterical while being the masterminds behind the whole endeavour”. You could read it as a reclamation of the mid-00s era, when dishevelled white-girl stars were assumed to be out of control: we know now that Hilton was just cosplaying as an airhead, although Britney Spears wasn’t so lucky, losing the right to run her own life when she was placed under a conservatorship that lasted 14 years.
“It’s an ‘early internet’ type of glamour that until very recently was still considered very low taste,” says Gamble. Slayyyter has named a song Brittany Murphy after the late Clueless and Girl, Interrupted star who died of pneumonia, anaemia and excessive prescription medication use in 2009, age 32. “Once-maligned women of that era are now being reappraised,” Gamble suggests.
This week, Slayyyter went on America’s Tonight Show for the first time wearing a bra made of beer cans, evoking an infamous scene in the Murphy-starring trailer-trash pageant movie Drop Dead Gorgeous. The knowing “white trash” aesthetic could be seen as reflecting and romanticising the economic reality for many in the US. In 2010, one reporter wrote of Kesha: “She’s this white-trash celebration. She’s where the lowbrow get to feel like the highbrow.”
Prof Robin James theorises that “if ‘white trash’ names whiteness that is threateningly close to Blackness, then white queer women performing ‘trashy’ femininity is a way for them to do something like a white girl equivalent of ‘ratchet’ – ie a femme sexuality that exists outside the boundaries of racialised, classed respectability.” She notes its debt to rap: “Of course, Black artists like Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B did this half a decade ago.”
Major labels are taking note of how profitable this archetype is. Having started releasing her songs on SoundCloud, Slayyyter signed with Columbia for her latest album. Korean singer Heyoon, a former member of the squeaky-clean pop band Now United, recently released the hyperactive EP Seriously Unserious, reflecting the trash-pop sound’s incursion into the highly lucrative South Korean market. “I grew up a ‘performer’ which forced me to look perfect and do things perfectly,” she says. Pivoting to what’s “raw and messy” allowed her to leave behind the stress of striving for flawlessness. “It was a healing experience for me,” she says.
The sound is now so popular it’s already being satirised. Comedian Meg Stalter – of Hacks and Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much – just launched a music career with the knowing Prettiest Girl in America, textbook trash-pop about how hard it is to be rich, famous and beautiful, which features a “tramp stamp” tattoo on its artwork.
While this aesthetic stands in stark contrast to a parallel wave of sleekly retro-styled pop stars such as Olivia Dean, Raye and Sienna Spiro, it arguably risks becoming just as contrived; the trash-pop look might suggest maxed-out credit cards, but underneath are financially savvy pop stars. However, culture critic Philippa Snow argues that gen Z is unlikely to care whether or not these artists are truly putting their crumpled dollars where their mouth is. “All trends are performative by nature, no?” she says. As for gen Z fans who adopt the look without the tequila habit to match, “maybe they’re on to something in the long run: we all brutalised our bodies in the 00s.”
Yet there’s more driving the trend than just the urge to have a good time. “People’s rights are being taken away from them,” says Harding. “Queer people, women, all deserve to be angry. This music turns frustration into celebration and hopefully on the other side, some kind of action.” And Lo says: “Just letting that inner turmoil out and letting it roam is cathartic as fuck. I’m happy many of us are realising that.”
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