Kim Petras on Her High-Voltage New Album ‘Detour’—and Bringing Its World to Life Through Fashion

It was around a year ago that Kim Petras was putting the finishing touches on her latest album, Detour, and beginning to play some of its material for her (former) label. The reaction wasn’t exactly effusive. Only in her early 30s, Petras had already spent 15 years in the music industry machine by then, in a series of different guises: making wide-eyed bubblegum pop in 2017, gothic synth-pop with 2019’s Turn Off the Light, hyper-sexualized heaters during her Slut Pop era, and of course, sidling up to mainstream success courtesy of her Grammy-winning Sam Smith collab, “Unholy.” (There’s a long-running joke within her fanbase about the number of “debut” albums she’s released.)

But Detour was a different beast altogether: a bracing fusion of industrial EDM, grunge, and pop that gave her team at the label cold feet. After the project was put on ice, in January Petras called out the label publicly and asked to be dropped from her contract. A few months later, she had bought herself out, and decided to release Detour independently at the end of May, footing the bill herself. As the title song and opening track on the album make clear, it’s the start of an entirely new chapter for Petras. “This is the beginning of the end,” her voice cries out. “Everything before is just pretend.”

A few days after its release, the initial euphoria of finally getting the record out into the world has subsided, and Petras is reflecting on what she went through to get to this point. “It’s been a year of negotiations and struggling and not getting a clear answer and believing in this music so much and not wanting to change it,” Petras says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, followed by a sigh. “I think the last two days there was a little bit of grief mixed with the excitement. Just like… ugh, damn, there was a year of me not being really excited about getting up in the morning, and not being able to tell my friends who are so proud of this when it’s going to come out. Everything was so uncertain.”

So, when she finally got the all clear to release it in early May, she went full speed ahead. “We just were like, ‘Okay, the soonest date we can possibly put this out, I’m going to put this out.’”

Photo: Anya GTA