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For as long as we’ve known Kim Petras, we’ve known just how badly she wanted to be a pop star. The German singer never left any doubt about her dreams of becoming famous or the lengths she was willing to go to pursue them. For much of her career, Petras assumed the role of bimbo-starlet, leaning into the limelight in a way that both showcased her talent and spotlit the tradeoffs she’d made to get there. Her music owned up to being horny, garish, and superficial, but could scan as thin or cheap when held up to other kinds of ethical or political scrutiny. As a performer, she assumed the risk of keeping things purely on the surface by working within pop’s framework while winking at its limits. No matter how many allusions she made to being sluttier, spookier, and more in on the industry joke than she first appeared, it was hard not to feel that the brighter and more polished her records became, the more utterly vacant they felt.
Petras finally reached a long-in-the-making impasse earlier this year. After 2023’s Feed the Beast, the singer discovered how difficult it can be to make any kind of meaningful statement with your tongue lodged too firmly in your cheek. That album tried (and failed) to go for broke by selling out with a sneer in Europop tracks as shiny and soulless as an L.A. high-rise. At the same time, Petras began to experience increasing physical and psychological strain: tearing a tendon, touring through exhaustion, and sparring with her label. After working with a clutch of new collaborators on original material that she claims was shelved yet again, Petras publicly accused her label of not paying her producers for their work. Then she went nuclear: “I’m tired of having no control over my own life or career,” Petras posted. “I want to continue to self fund and self curate my own music. This is why I have formally requested to be dropped by @RepublicRecords.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Regardless of how faithfully (or creatively) you count her previous releases, Detour feels like Kim Petras’ true artistic debut, her first album to stand on its own creative merits without mainstream triangulation or industry concessions. Despite its title, the record is a major course correction rather than a casual stopover—the first project where she’s finally assimilated all of her talents and eccentricities into the kind of pop music she always should have been making. With the assist of an all-star team of collaborators including Frost Children, Margo XS, and Porches, the singer strikes out from major-label purgatory and makes a much-needed break for weirder and more exciting musical territory.
Detour opens with Petras laying down the gauntlet while idling on the edge of an enormous cliff. “This is the beginning of the end/Everything before was just pretend,” she sneers over blistering, five-alarm synths, feeling out the music’s danger before the beat hurtles into a chasm of pummeling noise. Throughout the record, the image of Petras’ life in freefall recurs, giving the record a sense of hair-whipping freedom and heart-stopping urgency. On tracks like “Need for Speed” and “101,” she’s flexing and joyriding—but on the record’s most emotionally fraught moments, it dawns on Petras that her only options are either leaping in or getting swallowed whole. On “DTLA,” the singer’s speaker-rattling boasts are gradually phased out by a piercing cry from the heart. In the song’s third act, Petras stares out at the city from a penthouse and is suddenly overwhelmed by how far she’s come and the distance she’s poised to fall: “It’s such a long way dowwwn,” she belts, making a pained, epic arch out of her voice.
Detour is largely propelled by the same engine as Petras’ previous work—sexy, fuck-it-all abandon phrased in the most maximalist terms possible. The album swerves between blunt-force bangers and finely crafted pop gems that showcase a new subtlety to her songwriting. Like Slayyyter’s WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, Detour bails out of industry niceness by making the loudest racket possible, with Petras barreling into the more dissonant end of hyperpop. You can hear the legacy of the singer’s beloved mentor SOPHIE through the record’s interplay between sparkling and abrasive textures. Songs like “Polo” and “Freak It” smoulder with growling bass and pulverizing drums, redeeming their surface-level stupidity with their well-observed surface tension. On “101,” she raps, vamps, and gets mixed into the beat’s chaos by Frost Children, her voice billowing in and out of earshot as the song surges and swarms to the point of white-out.
In a just world, Detour would be a major calling card for both Petras and her producers, who litter the record with perfectly calibrated details that give it a remarkable amount of personality. “Need for Speed” features some of Petras’ tightest and hookiest songwriting, stacking her chorus with tricky, interlocking syllables that get underlined by silly, strategically placed vocal fills. When they aren’t setting the club on fire, Petras and co. dial up the romance and longing. On the windswept “Jeep,” Petras’ fantasy of simple country living is set against a guitar strum that’s gradually subsumed by an absolutely tidal synth so that it occupies the exact middle point between “Don’t Tell Me” and “It’s Okay to Cry.” On “Korea” she weighs her professional troubles in the form of an aching lullaby, artfully mispronouncing “career” in a way that’s scarcely been heard since Stephen Malkmus sang “Cut Your Hair.”
But these are all dress rehearsals for “Brutalist,” Petras’ greatest song to date. The track is an ode to thwarted dreams, reflecting on the memory of a now-demolished building that her father used to point out on the way to her appointments for gender-affirming care. After avoiding references to being trans in her early career, Petras draws on a sense of understanding and loss that is profoundly rooted in her experience. In the album’s most stunning moment, Petras juxtaposes her own disappointment at the building’s destruction against her father’s shuttered expectations that his child might grow up to be his son. It is a moment that is gorgeously conflicted in its humanity—an unresolved, open wound of a metaphor that cuts across the incompatibility of their desires and the impossibility of ever inhabiting one’s old dreams.
Even if it is obsolete as a marker of place, the building endures as a touchstone for her imagination: a lost ideal that Petras can still inhabit in her art. “But it was really there, it meant so much to me/But now they ruined it,” she sings, both dwelling on her loss and tying off the loose ends into an infinite loop. By the end of Detour, you realize that the life and death stakes that make her album so thrilling aren’t as straightforward as they seem: Even if you crash out of the music industry, the virtue of being an artist is that you can always debut again.
