Kim Petras Takes a New Road

On a rain-slicked night in downtown Los Angeles, high above the gridlock, Kim Petras found herself staring down from a penthouse balcony into the neon-lit abyss. To the outside world, she was the ultimate manifestation of Euro-pop perfection: a history-making, Grammy-winning icon encased in custom couture, engineered to churn out high-gloss, chart-topping hits. But inside the penthouse, the silence was deafening. “You are out in DTLA partying, but then the night ends on being alone in a penthouse, looking down, and saying, ‘It’s such a long way down,’ screaming from the penthouse, and no one can hear me,” Petras says, her voice dropping to a vulnerable register. “I like tearing down what’s projected onto me, this egocentric, bitchy, cuntish, skinny pop girl, when the real person just can’t hide anymore. That is what triggered this.”

The “this” in question is Detour, a thrillingly chaotic, fiercely independent new album that functions as both a creative exorcism and a sonic rebirth. For years, Petras has been one of the industry’s premier pop maximalists, pumping out a slick, synth-driven, sex-positive phantasmagoria of electric, club-ready hits—but compliance came at a physical and emotional cost. “Physically, on the songs I was making before this, I felt like I couldn’t go on stage and perform them,” she admits. “In my body, I felt it.”

Then came the literal breaking point. While performing in skyscraper heels, Petras jumped off a stage and split her tendon. The injury—which occurred while she was concocting Detour— forced her into a medical boot for nearly ten months, compelling reflection. “My body was literally telling me I needed to recalibrate everything, and I just followed that,” she reflects. “I’m just so grateful that I get to put this album out. It feels like a restart and a rebirth, and I’m really excited to share it with everyone.”

Rather than assembled by a label-selected team of writers and producers, Detour is fueled by late-night frustration and a DIY spirit. By day, Petras was wrapped up in major-label sessions that felt increasingly fruitless. By night, she staged a quiet coup in her freshly constructed home studio. “A lot of these sessions were after-sessions that I was doing where I hated the music I was making,” Petras laughs, with a flash of her signature subversion. “I was having Frost Children and Margo XS and everyone at my house, and I would go after my sessions to make this as a little rebellious thing that no one really knew about.” After months of lobbying for the release of these more personal tracks, Petras formally requested to be dropped from her label—and her wish was granted.

Free from the pressure of chasing radio hooks, Petras leaned heavily into her most fundamental, unfiltered sonic cravings. “I have a deep love for tacky, trashy EDM, and I have a really deep love for mixing genres,” she declares. On Detour, she flings open the floodgates, colliding disparate eras of internet culture and club music. “I’m really playing with genres, from Soulja Boy to straight-up reggae to dubstep to all my favorite shit. I always think everything good sonically needs to have an element of something that’s considered bad in it—things that are deemed trashy and tacky. It’s a mix of those things.”

This approach extended to the recording booth. The endlessly and meticulously polished vocal stems of her past were replaced by raw, first-thought-best-thought performances. Alongside her close circle of collaborators—including Margo XS, Porches, Frost Children, and nightfeelings—Petras worked on the basis of instinct. “The core belief of everyone involved [was] doing what feels the most emotional, even with vocal takes,” she explains. “We weren’t going for the perfect vocal take, but the emotional one with the cracks in it, not having everything lined up so perfectly. Every aspect of this is with the intention of taking it away from the main road and onto a different one.”

Detour’s narrative arc mirrors this turbulent journey, kicking off with the aggressive, industrial title track. “It had to start with driving off [onto] this unknown path,” she asserts. “The dubsteppy, really hard ‘Detour’ title track was perfect as a ramp into this universe, and starting with ‘This is the beginning of the end’ is just the perfect way to get into it.”

The album hits every emotional corner, including contemplations on her childhood. On standout track “Brutalist,” a pulsing, Kraftwerk-inspired German chorus, she confronts the heavy realities of her youth as a high-profile child transitioner. The song—whose video, backdropped by the Manhattan skyline, was released on Friday along with the album—tackles the crushing weight of public scrutiny and the toxic warnings of onlookers who claimed she would “ruin her body.” “It takes you into all these corners of my mind that I have struggled with, like other people’s opinions and keeping up the facade,” she confides. “The wildness of how up and down the whole album is was really important to me because that’s what my life really feels like and what a pop star feels like. That’s the fantasy of it—the good and the bad.”

Petras veers off-road sonically with “Jeep,” a stripped-back ballad driven by guitar that also serves as the fifth and final single for the album. A rumination on her experience as an outsider and immigrant, the track delves into cyclical desire—the impossible desire for someone who doesn’t understand you; the impossible desire of the American dream. The title of the track stems from an experience that conflates those two desires: early in her time in Los Angeles, she annoyed a date by mistakenly calling his truck a Jeep, a result of the resounding popularity the company boasts in Germany—Jeeps basically are trucks in German lingo. That tension of clashing cultures and perceived alienation push the raw emotion of “Jeep” into fresh territory for Petras.

The emotional anchor of Detour lies in the profound sense of safety and community Petras nurtured with her co-creators. For an artist who has spent her entire career navigating a cis-dominated industry, collaborating with fellow trans women like Margo XS and Angel of Frost Children changed the creative chemistry entirely. “[They] are both trans girls, so we have a lot of shared experiences and similar feelings,” Petras shares softly. “I just feel really at home, and that’s the only way that deeper songs like ‘Jeep’ or ‘Korea’ didn’t feel embarrassing, because I felt really understood. I’ve always wanted to have a sisterhood with other trans girls, to lift each other up, talk about music, and philosophize about everything, because you do see things similarly. We are completely different people, but things connect us, and there is a real family feeling that allows me to be free.”

While Petras is deeply proud of her identity, she remains keenly aware of the double standards and systemic limitations the music industry places on artists from underrepresented backgrounds. Despite her global success, she notes that mainstream media rarely allows her to simply be a musician. “I’m just like, Fuck it, I just want to be an artist,” she proclaims, a note of weariness cutting through her typical optimism. “In front of all of us, there’s always going to be ‘trans pop star’ or ‘trans artist.’ Does that happen with gay artists? No, at some point people get over it, but I still see ‘trans pop star’ everywhere.”

Petras also points to a broader trend of superficial allyship within the entertainment industry—one that gladly utilizes the æsthetics of the queer community without offering true institutional equity. “I’m really proud to be openly trans, and I’ve always chosen to talk about it like it’s normal because it is normal. It’s been a difficult one to figure out, and there are weird limits that people put on how big of an audience you can have because of your identity. That also exists for Black artists, people with different skin colors, and different sexualities; there’s a limit associated with that…that sucks.”

If the mainstream market comes with frustrating caveats, Petras finds her total liberation on the festival stage—specifically when performing for the queer community that built her. “I’ve made a decision to not play anything where I wouldn’t go or feel safe being at,” she states firmly. “I only want to play things where I can offer people a safe space and where I can fully one-hundred-percent be myself.” Every time I have seen Petras take the stage, she has fully centered the queer and trans communities—whether opening for Troye Sivan in Houston early in her career, blasting her hits to adoring fans at a queer underground castle party in San Diego, or taking over the legendary Parisian haunt Silencio during fashion week.

Her uncompromising stance provides her a unique, uninhibited connection with her fans, characterized by a shared, hyper-specific sense of humor. “I did gay pride in D.C. and asked, ‘Where are all my tops at?’ and it got a mild reaction, and then I said, ‘Fucking liars!’ and everyone cheered,” she beams. “I get to do stupid shit like that where my humor is automatically understood, which is fucking awesome.”

This mutual devotion was forged in the trenches of the club circuit. Petras traces her entire career back to the gritty, high-energy rooms of New York City, a place that still informs her preferences for live venues. “I credit New York for starting my career; they were the first to play my songs, and it all started out of little bars in Brooklyn,” she grins. She recalls her early days in the city with crystalline clarity, pointing to a formative moment when designer Christian Cowan dressed her in a sweatsuit with bedazzled strings, leading to a legendary meeting with nightlife royalty Amanda Lepore—herself a trailblazer for trans women at the forefront of culture.

That gritty, club-kid energy informs how she views touring today. For Petras, a seated venue is the ultimate vibe-killer. “In general, the best concerts anyone ever has are all in New York; people there just want to fucking go crazy,” she insists. “I always make a point to play the places where you stand up—the warehouses and the Brooklyn venues—because a Radio City-type show where everyone sits down is always a little lame to me.”

Her live experiences have also made her a keen observer of crowd psychology, noting a distinct cultural divide when she crosses the Atlantic. “In Europe, fewer people have their phones up, whereas in America, it’s about wanting to take a picture to show everyone you’re there,” she observes. “In Europe, maybe it’s more about wanting to experience it and remembering the moment forever; both are current, fair, and awesome.”

But nothing compares to the euphoric, weather-defying moments born out of pure solidarity. Reminiscing about her 2018 performance alongside SOPHIE at New York’s queer festival Ladyland, Petras’s description feels cinematic. “I have a crazy memory at Ladyland. It was pouring, and everyone stayed; people still come up to me and say they stayed in the rain, and my vocal was ascending!” she beams, looking forward to her upcoming headlining performance at this summer’s iteration. “We were all so locked in together in the moment; I was not going to leave, and they were not going to leave. It was pouring rain with wind in my hair and a storm, and I’ll never forget that. I hope it fucking rains again!”

This new chapter of radical authenticity required a total overhaul of Petras’s visual identity. The pop-star armor has been recontextualized; in its place is a visual style driven purely by narrative and personal passion rather than corporate curation. “[Visually], I was most driven by telling the story,” Petras shares. To achieve this, she paired up with director Ashley Hood, who helmed two music videos (“I Like Ur Look” and “Need for Speed”) for the album cycle. “I’m super inspired by Ashley, who has a really distinct style,” she notes.

As a self-described “fashion collector” who finds pure joy in style, Petras decided to cut out the middlemen entirely for this era. Instead of tapping stylists to curate her looks, she is pulling directly from her own archive. “I wanted this to feel like a real wardrobe—the real closet of me with the things that I collect—which is why I’m not working with stylists on this one; I’m inspired by doing it myself,” she says proudly. The goal? A seamless blend between her public persona and her private reality. “I want to step on stage the way that I walk down the street and vice versa. I don’t want it to be too charactery; I really want to wear what I really wear on stage, in my music videos, everything.”

When she isn’t fine-tuning her own genre-bending tracks, Petras is consuming music with the insatiable appetite of a fan, constantly championing the emerging artists pushing the culture forward. Her current playlist is a testament to her love for the avant-garde and the unapologetic. She is currently vocal about her love for artists and collaborators like Frost Children, Ninajirachi, Tiffany Day, and Margo XS, whom she praises as brilliant minds who offer a genuine, family-like sisterhood in the studio. She counts herself a fan of Rebecca Black, noting that there are simply “so fucking many talented people out there that are a blast to experience!” And another bright spot in her daily rotation? “CeCe Natalie all the fucking way,” Petras exclaims. “I’m addicted to CeCe Natalie, so that’s my choice for right now.”

With Detour, Kim Petras is switching gears, pulling off the label-dominated popstar track to carve out her own path. By embracing the cracks in her voice, the trashy EDM of her youth, and the unconditional support of her chosen family, she has emerged stronger, sharper, and entirely on her own terms. “I’m so grateful to my friends for making this album with me,” she gushes. “It feels more current to me now than it did a year ago, so I’m actually happy.”

Be the first to see this story and many more in print by preordering your copy of our eleventh issue here. Kim has selected UNICEF, which is working to provide humanitarian aid to children in Gaza, as the recipient of proceeds from direct sales of CERO 11.⁠