Kim Petras wants to be a representative of bad taste

The best song on Kim Petras’ new album Detour starts with a twinkle of synth and throb of bass ripped straight from a mid-Aughts classic. For some listeners, maybe that’s reductive, but it’s refreshing to hear sacred pop texts, like Love. Angel. Music. Baby. and The Dutchess, alive in Petras’ DNA. What she really likes about those albums is their awareness of that loose, braggadocious production style found on Polow da Don, Timbaland, and Pharrell recordings. The distance between Bubba Sparxxx and the woman who made “Throat Goat” is shorter than you’d expect. “They feel swaggy on their shit, you know?” Petras says to me over Zoom. “It’s in the air for me right now.” It’s in the air for all of us, thanks to singers like Sexyy Red and Zara Larsson. 

Detour was drip-fed to us through singles of high quality and even higher contrast. Petras learned her lesson about drunk-texting demos to contacts on her phone and protected these thirteen songs, only giving fans snippets via low-quality mixes. I ask her if leaks have made her more or less precious about releasing music. She replies: “It’s made me more and less afraid of it.” Petras and her producers didn’t even bounce some of the record, like the “DTLA” outro or the “this is the beginning of the end” line that introduces “Detour,” so that everyone could experience those moments together. 

What arrived at midnight today is a riot of campy electropop throwbacks brought to life by Porches, Frost Children, and Margo XS, who recently produced Larsson’s Midnight Sun. Together they formed the “Fellowship of the Detour,” meeting up after recording sessions to “philosophize about music,” Petras says. “We would make songs and it felt like this secret thing we were doing behind everyone’s back.” What’s more, those artists care about Petras and she cares about them. “I really respect everyone’s culture that they’re creating at their own concerts and in their own music, and they helped me through this.” 

The “this” in question is Petras’ recent departure from Republic Records, who she alleged delayed Detour for six months once it was finished. In a post on X, she told her followers that she requested a contract release. “I’m tired of having no control over my life or career,” she said. “I’m dropping Detour regardless.” But it was never going to be that easy. She had new singles to share, but could only upload them to SoundCloud or YouTube. “Mr. Producer” pulls from rap like Gwen Stefani and Fergie did on their songs twenty years ago. “Cha Cha” is nonsensical like Petras’ 2025 collaboration with the late SOPHIE, “Reason Why.” Neither track ended up on Detour, but Margo XS, Porches, and Frost Children were there to break Petras out of the mess. “They helped me stand my ground and believe in myself.” It’s like a trans Justice League for electronic music. And SOPHIE’s presence lingered heavily in those moments, because the producer wanted to help Petras find her creative freedom. “Obviously, during her time, that never happened,” Petras sighs. “But I feel like she would be super proud that I finally did it.” 

SOPHIE appears posthumously on “Basketball,” a song dating back to 2019. I ask Petras what part of her creative partnership with the producer is now fundamental to her art. “Emotion is everything,” she says with a smile, “and disregarding perfection but also really caring about it at the same time.” Petras doesn’t know anyone who’s as sure of their vision as SOPHIE was of hers. “She’d say, ‘Let’s jump in, let’s do it.’ That’s something I take with me now, because that’s the most inspiring thing ever to be around—someone who’s like, ‘No, this is it. We’re doing it this way. Go.’”

Pop music should be about making the loudest and most colorful thing possible. That’s what SOPHIE said. I hear that M.O. throughout Detour, especially in the deconstructed club noise of “Polo” and the hardstyle techno of “Freak It.” Even the sugary, bloghouse rush of “I Like Ur Look,” which Petras made in tribute to her “faves from Kylie Minogue and first-generation K-pop,” is high-vis hedonism. I ask Petras what the Slut Pop version of herself would think about “I Like Ur Look.” She says the response would be something like, “Whoa, this is an all-time pop highlight.” Cocky? Maybe, but it’s a fair read on her part. This album paws at the same provocateur excellence its enfant terrible counterparts, like WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA and U. 

But my favorite moment on Detour is “Jeep,” because Petras is on her Madonna American Life, Eurotechno, Alex G folktronica bullshit. It’s undeniable stuff—cosmic country wiped with sticky Auto-Tune; the “middle American shit” sibling to Charli XCX’s “White Mercedes.” Not just a pivot from Petras’ usual hyperpop style, but a time capsule of those psychedelic early 2010s in the Midwest. And to think a German transplant in Los Angeles could capture it so perfectly. The track—the whole album, really—is giving Ugg boots and white Monster energy drinks. Top to bottom, it’s sweaty, silly, and stupid; truck night at the lake turned into the loudest club in the world. Under Petras’ newfound command, “Most Trashy” is a superlative you want to win. “We can just drive around! Listen to tecccchno! Listen to Emmminem! Listen to Sliiipknot!” she sings on the bridge. “Sex in the parking lot, gas station! Maybe you can buy a new shirt there, too!” 

Petras is hellbent on living on the outskirts of culture. I ask her what she means by that, exactly. “I always look at popular music and I’m like, ‘What’s opposing that?’ or ‘What’s not in the mainstream?’” she explains. “I want to be a representative of bad taste.” Right now, 2010s EDM and Eurotrash are pariah genres, but Petras wants to represent everything tacky, cringe, and aged-out. It’s the opposite of Eighties nostalgia, she thinks. “Pop music is so much about the shit that people scream in the club, which is usually the stupidest line. And it has to be bad to be screamed drunkenly at a bar.” It’s funny because, in Petras’ own words, Detour is “going off the rails and going off the road that I felt like I was being sent down,” yet it’s her most poised and accomplished project yet—an anti-commercial pop banger that could go bar-for-bar with anyone on the charts right now. This is the idol Petras was promised to be when “Heart to Break” came out eight years ago.

Reaching that zenith required agency and control, but that doesn’t mean parts of Petras’ previous work were sacrificed for personal power. She’s acutely aware of the integrity of a well-written song but wants to break as many rules as she can. She wants to bend pop music structures until they’re unmistakably hers, because, at some point, writing run-of-the-mill, “let’s try to make a hit” songs started to repulse her. She hated being guided by people forcing her into industry boxes and relevant styles she was wary of. Her body “started rejecting” the “perfect popstar” trope her record deal placed her in. Petras knew her music could be greater than makeup counter white noise, so she would come home from sessions and write clandestine songs that she liked—songs that stripped away her personas: L.A. brat, serial killer, sexual deviant, “label pet.” That’s where Detour comes from, wanting something to “play front-to-back at a party for people I want to be around, people who like the same things that I like,” and wanting to be proud of the art she made. 

The song she’s most proud of is “Brutalist,” which she sees as a “tangible improvement” on her songwriting. Next to an almost Kraftwerk style of German electronic production, Petras uses a story of her architect dad’s critique of a since-demolished building as a metaphor for people’s perceptions of “trans people ruining their bodies”: “Yeah, they took a knife to it. They took a bomb to it. They bulldozered it. They didn’t give a shit; it really breaks my heart what they did to it.” It’s a glimpse into a vulnerable, sweet part of Petras that she “needed to unlock.” 

Making Detour helped Petras earn back her “trust in my own taste and opinion,” reaffirming her capabilities as a curator and trashpop supernova. At the end of our call, she references the old “love is about being known” adage, admitting that she “created characters a lot in my career, and I do think that characters can be as real as the real person that you are, but I really do want my fans to know me.” Specifically, Petras wants her fans to hear her reinvention, to hear these songs shift from “I’m the best person in the world” to “life is only getting worse” and feel the same thing. “That felt really rewarding, that people could relate to their emotions and the uncertainty on some of the songs.” 

The way we rebel against the politics of people’s projections, Petras argues, is to humanize everyone. She started transitioning as a pre-teen but never wants to tell anyone to “do it like I did it,” because doing so makes her feel like a science experiment. “Everyone has their own life and their own path. I wanted to be an artist, I feel like that’s my calling, but I am also a proud trans person.” The online conversations around Petras’ new album so far focus on what matters most to her: the songwriting, the music, and her skill as an artist. And she’s earned this chatter, because Detour is her best album yet—blowing way past the Europop residuals that powered Feed the Beast and Problématique.

Petras found mainstream recognition by becoming the first openly trans woman to win a Grammy award, when she and Sam Smith took home the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance prize in 2023 for “Unholy.” But that achievement and label do not exclusively define her at this phase in her career, and she confronts the industry making a spectacle of her on “Need For Speed”: “You don’t really know me, no one really knows me.” Being a trans pop trailblazer is like a gender marker on your passport, she argues. “The person you are is completely detached from that. Some experiences might shape you, but I want to be a multi-dimensional person like everyone else.” 

Detour is out now on BunHead Records.

Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.

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