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.’”

It isn’t hard to understand why Petras was so eager for the album to see the light of day—Detour is, somewhat remarkably given the circumstances, her best and most accomplished body of work yet. There’s the thrilling lead single “Polo,” in which she roars with righteous fury at the industry snakes—“alligators left and right”—who want to shape her image over buzzsaw synths and SOPHIE-style squelches, or the gorgeous “Jeep,” a country-inflected ballad that mourns a toxic relationship and her feeling of being an outsider in America. There’s the riotous, speaker-rupturing electroclash track “101,” a deliciously braggadocious banger in which she asserts her status as a “one-of-one” pop artist over a dirty, overdriven bassline and carnivalesque beats—it’s like a lost track from Gwen Stefani’s The Sweet Escape, but on methamphetamines.

Most striking of all, perhaps, is the track “Brutalist,” an autobiographical account of the long road trips she’d take with her architect dad while growing up in small-town Germany, journeying to visit far-flung clinics and specialists who could assist with her gender transition. They bonded over their shared love of a Brutalist post office they’d often pass; years later, Petras returned to the city to learn it had been demolished, which she cleverly flips as a devastatingly simple metaphor for her trans identity. Along with a handful of other tracks, it represents a more vulnerable—and ultimately powerful—mode of songwriting for Petras.

“It’s very personal,” she says. “There were moments where I really worried, oh, are people going to misinterpret this? Am I a little bit ashamed to share that much of… just myself?”

Petras made Detour with a new group of collaborators, notably the underground pop producer Margo XS, hyperpop duo Frost Children, and indie singer-songwriter Aaron Maine of Porches. “Without my friends, this wouldn’t have happened,” Petras says. They would convene at the studio by night, staying up until the early hours writing. (The secretive nature of the enterprise led them to nickname themselves “the fellowship of Detour”—a Lord of the Rings reference.) “There were a lot of conversations just philosophizing about music and what we think is bad taste, the 2010s, that kind of abrasiveness,” Petras recalls. “We were like, ‘How do we take that and make something new and fresh out of this, instead of nostalgia bait? How do we make something that sounds like the future to us?’” By day, Petras would continue doing sessions with more mainstream pop producers—“to please the label.”

Ultimately, they decided to “fuck things up a little,” going against the instinct of striving for pop perfection that had been drilled into Petras during her years in the major label system. It wasn’t easy at first—“I’m a Virgo, so I’m super perfectionist,” she notes—but she soon started leaning into rawer vocal takes, leaving the mispronunciations and quirks that come with speaking English as a second language, rather than ironing them out as she would have done previously.

Gibbons’s custom EU star polo in his studio.

“I still feel like an outsider a little bit in LA, even after 10 years of living here,” she says. “I still feel like I sometimes don’t get every cultural detail. We just thought there was something really charming about that. About feeling like the German girl who comes to LA and wants to make it big, but still has an accent and struggles to find love and struggles to balance it with her hardcore work ethic—and is 10 minutes early to everything because I’m German,” she adds, laughing.

Those ideas ultimately inspired Petras to wear a custom set decorated with the stars of the European flag on the album cover, custom-designed by the Irish designer Timothy Gibbons, one-half of the CFDA-nominated brand Gabe Gordon.

To build out the other parts of Detour’s visual world, Petras worked with her creative director Eli Sheppard—though, for the fashion, she was mostly styling herself. “I really wanted to do that, because I’m already actively building an archive of clothes and outfits from collections I’m obsessed with,” she says, citing some of Marc Jacobs’s most iconic collections for Louis Vuitton—the sugary-sweet florals and gold heels of spring 2007, the Richard Prince nurses of spring 2008—as particular fixations. (And longtime fixations at that: She recalls running home from school as a young teen to stream the shows on FashionTV on YouTube.)

The only new look she called in was a Dsquared2 denim dress; otherwise, it was all vintage, including plenty of outfits from forgotten ’00s mall brands she’s picked up at Nine Two Five in Downtown L.A.

If the looks she’s wearing across the Detour visuals are not exactly what she’d wear to get an iced coffee in the morning—“my day-to-day style is very much, like, a zip-up hoodie and a miniskirt or jeans,” she says—in the same way that the record contains some of her frankest songwriting to date, the clothes also serve as a more authentic reflection of who she is. “I still have crazy looks from my earlier eras that I cherish and I’d never get rid of,” she says. “But I’m trying to get the gap between stage Kim and regular Kim to be as little as possible these days.”

One imagines that the effusive response to both the album and the world she’s created to surround it is incredibly validating—given how much the material means to her, and how hard she fought to share it. “It’s the first time that I’m really trusting my own gut and not relying on people who have hits or are really big in the industry to tell me this is good,” she says. “I think this is good, and I want to play it for my friends, and that means I want to play it for my fans—and it’s the first time I’m really trusting that and not just taking the easy route of, ‘Okay, people are saying this is a good move, so I’m going to do it.’”

There were many dark nights of the soul along the way, but deep down, Petras never quite gave up hope: “I think I knew that I was going to fight for it, whatever it would take.”