At a time when pop stars are returning to the gonzo sounds of the 2010s, Kesha’s meeting the moment with a ballistic new album about freedom, released through her own label.
The ritual of signing a recording contract was once the aspiring pop star’s ultimate dream. Kesha, who turned 37 this year, signed hers at 18 with the RCA imprint Kemosabe Records. But what followed was almost 10 years of litigation, including a high-profile legal battle (which doesn’t need to be rehashed here) in which Kesha fought to regain sovereignty over her own voice. Though she was initially denied release from her contract, a confidential settlement was reached in 2023, and on March 6, 2024, she had secured full legal rights back to everything she’d lost at 18. “It gave me a vision of everything about the music business that needs to change,” she says of that day in a recent video call. Most importantly, she was finally free.
Kesha expresses that sentiment over and over during our interview, speaking to The FADER just before a tour rehearsal, always coming back to that central point: “I am a free bitch.” On July 4, she will release Period — a truly ballistic, freeing record filled with abrupt genre-swerves and polka-inspired accordion — her first release on her own terms under her own imprint: Kesha Records.
“The last time you guys heard an album from me, I was preparing for trial,” she adds, referring to her 2023 project Gag Order. “Now, absolutely everything is different. I feel like the color has come back into my life.” She’s started dancing again. She’s started singing at home again. She begins most mornings doing both alongside her collection of Italo Disco records. Not long ago, she couldn’t even listen to music — “the love of my life that I’d sacrificed everything for, it was such a source of pain.” It was particularly hard to listen to her own music. She felt isolated, she says, sad, and “forgotten by the world that I just became really insular.” All music represented what she didn’t have the freedom to do.
After March 6, 2024, she began poring through her discography for the first time in years, some of which she hasn’t been able to face in over a decade. “Listening back made me so proud of my younger self, the girl who was still fighting for people to feel loved and seen and accepted,” she says. “So I’ve decided I’m spiritually and energetically taking my fucking songs back. They’re my fucking songs.”
Aside from a credit as “girl” in 1991’s F.A.R.T. The Movie, Kesha first came to prominence as the uncredited vocalist in Flo Rida’s 2009 hit “Right Round.” Seven months later, her song “TiK ToK” became the first mega‑hit of the decade, holding the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 so firmly that not even Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie’s 25th anniversary remake of “We Are the World” could unseat it. (It would turn out that only the Black Eyed Peas would have that power.)
Borrowing her hilariously unearned bravado from the likes of Uffie and Peaches, Kesha was gentrified electropop’s answer to falling-up-the-stairs Jennifer Lawrence. She staggered through fame, exposing its rigidity through her own unpolished performance of it — a screwball heroine for the immediate post‑Britney age.
In early press, she gleefully spoke about pissing, shitting, and placentas. Today, she’s mellowed. She might drop the occasional “fuck,” but that’s as brash as she gets. She sings this way on Period, too. There are glints of brazen, dollar-sign Ke$ha, but she mostly delivers her lyrics with an unshaken purr, as if soothing you through a bad mushroom trip. While on “TiK ToK,” she insisted that the party wouldn’t start until she walked in, on “JOYRIDE.,” this album’s lead single, she sings: “This party sucks. I’m about to ditch.”
Kesha’s a little more magisterial nowadays, but her intentions aren’t so dissimilar to what they were when she started. She still wants to make people dance, act a fucking fool, get real stupid with it. “When there’s a recession and times can be hard, dancing is free. I want to make people dance,” she told US Weekly in 2010. Now that she’s truly free, she says wants to reclaim the Kesha that first walked into the party.
She had tried this with 2020’s High Road, but that album hit a wall immediately on release. It was the pandemic; there was no tour, or little way to respond to the work. In Pitchfork’s review of the album, they described High Road as “someone trying to portray freedom and free-spiritedness—even a recovered sense of identity—who isn’t quite there yet.” Kesha admits she agrees.
“High Road was a complicated process behind the scenes,” she says. “Because I really wanted to stand for joy, and I really wanted to make people dance, and I wanted to be playful and I wanted to be the thing that everyone knows and loves me for, but I wasn’t free. I was really lonely.” Kesha says her new work is really about her “doing whatever the fuck I want.”
Period arrives almost a year after brat, an album also about freedom and an artist doing whatever the fuck they wanted that manifested itself into a lifestyle and cultural lodestar, extending the possibilities of what a pop record could do and the reach it could have. Artists like Lorde say it has made them more ambitious. Kesha echoes something similar: “Charli’s always been ahead of the curve; it’s been really inspiring,” she says. Kesha’s appearance on Charli’s “Spring Breakers” remix last year reminded her that pop shouldn’t be a competition. “Growing up in this era of music, the people around me would try to compare me to other people. So, I couldn’t help but feel that I was in competition with people that I was a fan of, and it was a really confusing place to be.” She brings the point back to her freedom: “But, you know, through my process of gaining my freedom and really looking at my patterns of thinking that keep me from feeling free, I realize that the only competition is with myself.”
The world seems very ready for this reduxed Kesha. At a time when popstars are returning to the gonzo sounds of the 2010s and people are eagerly identifying so-called “recession indicators,” Kesha once again fits squarely in the cultural moment. She is performing with some of the best stats of her career. As of writing, she’s Spotify’s 64th most listened-to artist in the world, a number that’s been climbing all week. She achieved her second-highest days of streaming in mid-June. She’s headlining New York City’s Madison Square Garden for the first time in July.
A successful — here comes the refrain again — free bitch, Kesha’s even exploring the possibility of finally releasing the long-lost Lipsha album with the Flaming Lips. The project, which originated from Wayne Coyne’s early belief in her talent, has become the white whale of Kesha’s fan lore. She’s currently looking into whether she can finally release Lipsha on Kesha Records, “but I’m not sure what I legally can do,” she says.
One of the first releases on Kesha Records, other than her own album, is her mother Pebe Sebert’s shelved ‘80s album. “She’s told me many, many personal stories about the ways she’s been overlooked, how her album never came out, even though she made it almost fifty years ago,” she says. “I know that pain; it’s now in my bloodline and my lineage.” Kesha says she’s using Kesha Records to not only free herself but help heal her family too. “I want to give my mom her version of freedom, which is just to allow people to hear the music she worked so hard on.”
She uses this as an opportunity to segue into the app she’s working on: SMASH. Per an official press release, “SMASH aims to give music creators access to the professional community they need to make amazing music, without having to sign away their lives to get into the club.” The app, Kesha says, will become a place where artists can collaborate and connect without having to be conversant in the business and legal jargon that dominates the music business. She says that she sees the opportunity as a way to help “right the wrongs” that she’s personally seen while being in the business. She’s been immersing herself in the tech world for the past couple of years, building the app alongside Alan Cannistraro, the man responsible for developing the very first iPhone app, as well as creating Facebook’s AutoPlay video feature.
Knowing that the tech industry has historically taken advantage of an ailing music industry while only devaluing it further — like Spotify or AI music app Suno — and that Kesha just extricated herself from an industry system that left her feeling exploited and taken advantage of for decades, I ask her if she has faith that the tech industry is any better. “I do,” she says, a little hesitantly, “which is maybe, um, a little naïve.” She immediately corrects herself: “I have hope, but my eyes are wide open.”
Last November, she came under some heat for using AI to produce the artwork for single “Delusional,” which featured a pile of Birken bags with the song’s title embroidered onto them (some of the bags misspelled it as ‘DELLUSONAL’). Kesha claims the art was a “political statement on AI.” “When artists create, they should get paid, and I think it’s delusional for artists to keep creating without actually being paid.” She emphasizes that the backlash was a case of her intentions not coming across. In May, she changed the cover to a photo of her gagged and strapped to a chair. “At the end of the day, I decided that living in my own integrity and what I believe was more important than trying to prove a point.”
Kesha is keeping her eyes open and focused on making art that feels true to her. “I’ve been doing this for so long now, and there are parts of that journey that people know, and there are parts that nobody will ever know. So now my dream is to look into the business as a whole and see how I can be additive to healing that space.” The future became a possibility again on March 6, 2024. She’s been fantasizing about having a boat and chickens and an artist commune overlooking the ocean in Majorca or somewhere in Italy. “I have dreams again,” she says, “I can see them so clearly.”
Kesha’s ‘Period’ is out July 4.