Beset by conflicts with her label, Kim Petras defiantly doubles down on her stylistic detour with ‘Pretour,’ an independently-released four track EP whose songs test the bounds of good taste and further flesh out her bold new vision for pop music.
by guest writer Dylan Bedsaul
Stream: “Pop Sound” – Kim Petras
We’ve never seen a smooth album rollout for Kim Petras.
Mismanagement of her career became evident in 2023 when, thanks to a verse on Sam Smith’s “Unholy,” Petras went from underground curio to the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 and center stage at the Grammy Awards, where she became the first transgender person to win in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category. This should have spelled new and better opportunities for Petras, nevermind that all of the attention was aimed at one of the worst songs in her catalog.
As if straight from a popstar-themed dark fairytale, the bewildering success of “Unholy” incentivized Petras’ label, Republic Records, to micromanage her forthcoming full-length project, retro-fitting its sound and visuals to fit her new mainstream-approved aesthetic. When the tepid follow-up single “If Jesus Was A Rockstar” failed to make waves by repurposing the religious iconography of her newly-minted hit, the deductive reasoning was clear: more Satan, more sex, more latex and mesh.
Then came the real turbulence. Petras’ long teased follow-up LP, Problematique, was temporarily shelved in favor of the flash-cooked, Burger King dark pop on Feed the Beast. After the dust settled, a new Miami-themed installment of Slut Pop was released. There was even a feature on Katy Perry’s 143 – the flop heard ‘round the world. All bad things come in threes, I suppose? But really, how did the artist who arrived fully formed with “I Don’t Want It All” and the kaleidoscopic, stadium-ready “Can’t Do Better,” a muse to SOPHIE, develop into something so amateurish and dull, just as the world was finally listening? It appears we finally have our answer.
There were signs of another impending snafu as we entered the current Detour era, an era that has now lasted seven months since the first pre-release single dropped.
There is still no release date for the full LP and it is unclear if Republic Records will support the project.
“My album has been done for 6 months but my record label has refused to give me a release date or pay my collaborators for the work they’ve done,” Petras revealed in a tweet in late January. “This is why I have formally requested to be dropped by @Republic Records.” She went on to indirectly confirm that the self-funded videos were necessitated by the label not supporting her album campaign, gestured towards the insidious nature of the industry’s reliance on TikTok, and vowed to release Detour regardless. The gloves were coming off.
https://x.com/kimpetras/status/2013714524797620267
Thanks to a few interviews, snippets of several rumored album tracks previewed at DJ sets, and the three pre-release singles, we know quite a bit about the forthcoming record. What I initially feared was a craven attempt at Petras’ own version of Brat has since revealed itself to be an idiosyncratic, garish, and varied body of work – likely her strongest to date. In an interview with V Magazine, Petras described the upcoming LP as a “weird, abrasive new world” anchored by contributions from a “girl group” of fellow trans women, which includes Angel Prost of Frost Children and Margo XS.
Petras has not always been matched with the best collaborators. The true dark fairytale of her career began in 2016, long before “Unholy,” when she signed a publishing deal with Prescription Songs, contractually linking her to the infamous Lukasz Gottwald (a.k.a. Dr. Luke). He is the most frequent fixture in the liner notes of her solo discography. This ongoing partnership earned her a heavy dose of side-eye from members of the broader pop music listening community, who seemed to unanimously support Kesha in her bone-chilling allegations against the producer. None of Petras’ attempts to appease critics and claim neutrality proved successful.
To the delight of fans, Petras appears to have finally ditched the embattled producer and abject “Bozo,” which has taken her music to exciting new places, situating it in a growing EDM revival spearheaded by a cohort of women and queer people intent on reimagining the genre – Ninajirachi, Underscores, MGNA Crrrta, and Frost Children, to name a few. If the sacrificial lead single, “Polo,” merely set the tone for Petras’ aesthetic recalibration, the anthemic, piano-stabbing pre-chorus of “Freak It” set the bar. Equal-parts relentless, playful, and trashy, “Freak It” is well-suited to her vocal dexterity and irreverent pop persona, demonstrating a clear path forward in a career otherwise characterized by fits and starts. “I Like Ur Look” builds on this successful formula, with its crunchy synthesizers, clever turns of phrase and bimbo-fied longings. Every new album by Petras is jokingly billed as her debut, but Detour appears to be a true re-introduction and a much needed right-sizing after a heady brush with the mainstream.
Which brings us to the independent release of Pretour, Petras’ latest tactic in her battle with Republic Records.
Presumably to work around the label and keep the momentum going for an album campaign running on fumes, Petras announced the independent release of a four-track EP in February, which came with several expressed and implied caveats. The songs were not going to appear on Detour or be made available on all streaming platforms – just her YouTube and Soundcloud channels. Each track would be released one at a time, across a four-week period and with companion DIY visuals.
This is a curious strategy. I can’t think of a time when an artist leaked B-sides to justify the release of the A-sides. It sounds risky, no? What if the fans do not connect with these cuts, and the gulf in quality between them and the pre-release singles undermines fan confidence in the new era?
If Pretour was intended to demonstrate an appetite for new music, that was unlikely to be represented in streaming numbers that match or transcend those singles the label had already promoted and released across all platforms. What Pretour seems to have accomplished is a continuation of the momentum for Detour within the fanbase, a deepening of the lore around the album, and the broader appearance that Republic Records is acting in bad faith. Is it really that hard to set a date for the album and upload the songs to streaming? It’s a post-Taylor’s Version move, adjusted to match Petras’ more outre persona.
Since the release of Pretour, Petras has clarified that these songs were the early experiments that led to Detour – “think of these songs as the deluxe tracks that never were, a taste of what’s to come.” This may well explain the lo-fi sound and half-baked nature of some of the tracks. “Mr. Producer” and “Cha Cha” do not work as standalone tracks – the former relying too heavily on boilerplate trap and the hokey lyrical conceits of Slut Pop, the latter featuring a massive imbalance between the stylish electro-grunge production and the unadorned, infantile lyricism, which reads like a discarded Frankie Cosmos demo sans Greta Kline’s singular charm.
“Pop Sound” is the most successful track of the bunch and on par with the best singles from Detour, featuring weapons grade hooks, dystopic musings on the nature of pop stardom, and a drop a la Frost Children’s most successful tracks on SISTER. The song itself is hardly “pop,” with the exaggerated high frequencies and reverb-drenched vocals amounting to something that would more likely cause the car radio to explode than feature on Rick Dee’s Weekly Top 40. And then there’s “Get Some” featuring Cortisa Star, which sounds like it was recorded through a walkie talkie, aesthetically complementing the blown out 808s and stuttering, pulsating instrumental.
Pretour sounds like machinery – dark, rough and combustive.
In all of its DIY glory, the tracks unselfconsciously display their seams and their creators’ respective artistic ids. Sometimes unpolished, yes, but everything in this Detour-Pretour universe still seems to rhyme and converse with one another, across the various collaborators and sonic palettes presented. There’s a shared club kid vocabulary – it’s a world of tweaking (“Pop Sound”; “Get Some”), turning looks (“I Like Ur Look”; “Mr. Producer”; the unconfirmed but heavily-teased “Rare N’ Deluxe” and “DTLA”), freaking it (“Freak It”; “Get Some”), donning vintage polo shirts (“Polo”; the allegedly scrapped demo “Bozo” that was uploaded to Petras’ Tumblr account), and partying in major urban centers like Paris and Los Angeles (the Polo lounge in “Polo,” the arrondissements of “Freak It”; the unconfirmed “101” and “DTLA”). Altogether, Petras has a complete body of work; a universe unto itself and a leveling up of what has worked on earlier albums.
Petras’ appears to have retired from feeding the label beast and is instead feeding her core fanbase, which is not necessarily reflective of mainstream tastes and, thus, not likely to be financially-remunerative for a label. She’s also feeding her own artistic convictions, putting forth “what [she wants] pop music to be,” as she put it in a conversation with Meg Stalter for Interview. This tension appears to be at the center of the conflict between Petras and her label, if anything is to be gleaned from what we’ve heard so far. Petras’ apparent lack of control is difficult to stomach on the heels of her brief but significant brush with the mainstream. But according to Kim, we’ll hear it one day. Her Detour is not a threat – it’s a promise.
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Dylan Bedsaul is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He covers literary fiction and popular music.
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© courtesy of the artist
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