Kesha was embattled from the beginning. On her 2009 debut, she played a hard-partying dirtbag and became a glittery avatar of harmless depravity; critics, missing or ignoring her quasi-feminist lampoon of male behavior, wrote her off as an untalented attention-seeker. More recently, Kesha’s biggest fights have played out in courts of law rather than of public opinion, and her foes have been more fearsome. Still, her affect—at least the one she put into music—remained largely unyielding. “I’ve decided all the haters everywhere can suck my dick,” she declared on 2017’s “Let ’Em Talk,” a cut from the first album she released after unsuccessfully suing Dr. Luke, her former producer and mentor, over allegations of sexual and emotional abuse in 2014.
That album, Rainbow, was notably vague in its references to Kesha’s legal predicament; its core message is one of self-love and self-determination, haters (and unsympathetic judges) be damned. But in opting to “just let ’em talk,” Kesha invited the question of what she herself was withholding—a question that is bolded and underlined by the title of her fifth album, Gag Order. Kesha’s claims against Dr. Luke have been dropped or dismissed, and his countersuit for defamation is set to go to trial in July. “There’s so many things I said that I wish I left unsaid,” she sings on one new song. Speaking out has never seemed so perilous.
And so the Kesha of Gag Order is changed—still working in bold, chaotic gestures, but with the color drained from her palette. The survivor’s vim of Rainbow and youthful bacchanalia of its successor, 2020’s High Road, are gone; this Kesha is feeling her age, processing her trauma, relinquishing hope and then digging deeper in search of some more. “Only Love Can Save Us Now,” an anomaly, starts off with a glimmer of bygone times, with Kesha brat-rapping over a gimmicky cash register beat. But the first verse ends with a coffin-nailing declaration that reverberates across the record: “The bitch I was, she dead, her grave desecrated.” Tonally and spiritually, Gag Order recalls another album made by a pop star in the wake of a high-profile conflict with a powerful industry antagonist. The old Kesha can’t come to the phone right now, etc.
The production of this record—which Kesha made with Rick Rubin and various returning collaborators including her mom, songwriter Pebe Sebert—trends dark and stormy, powered by rumbling synths that sound like tornado sirens, or like a sandworm is lurking somewhere nearby. Played through the right set of speakers, the bleak and faithless opener “Something to Believe In” hits the chest harder than it hits the ears. This music shudders and roils; the way it lingers in the body feels potent on an album loaded with allusions to foundational trauma (though, per its title, much remains between the lines). “You don’t wanna be changed like it changed me,” is Kesha’s refrain on “Eat the Acid,” a song held together by an ominous drone. The lyric echoes a warning, once offered to Kesha by Pebe, about the risk of taking LSD: The mind can be expanded to the point of rupture. But innocence can be lost in more ways than one, and Kesha is certainly missing hers: “I remember when I was little/Before I knew that anyone could be evil,” she sings wistfully on “Happy.”
