Kesha bites back at legal controversy on new singles “Fine Line” and “Eat The Acid” off her highly-anticipated album, Gag Order. The lead singles are a breakthrough of anger doused in synths and subdued distortion. Kesha’s new album, Gag Order, set is out May 19th via Kemosabe/RCA Records
The new record finds the GRAMMY-nominated pop star excavating the deepest recesses of her soul to date. The Rick Rubin-produced record, which Kesha has labeled “post-pop,” is a full-bodied collection that flows like a stream-of-conscious journey through the psychedelic dark depths of the human psyche followed by basking in the cleansing light when finally reaching the surface.
Where Kesha’s past two records reminisced on freedom, enlightenment, and taking the higher road, the first tastings of Gag Order are chaotically cathartic. And no, it isn’t the slow-pulsing dance pop breaking through the folk atmosphere, Kesha is more direct than ever.
I wanted to make an album that sounds the way my head feels, dipping in and out of depression, gratitude, rage, and hope. Always moving.
Kesha tells Rolling Stone
“Fine Line” and “Eat The Acid” by Kesha
In a Instagram livestream, the singer stated that the album was “chronicling an ego death and a spiritual awakening at the same time.”
“You don’t want to be changed like it changed me,” Kesha hisses across the latter single, “Eat The Acid.” Plainly, it is a spiritual dark-Americana-scented bass-based ballad. Complexly, the song builds, swells and burns. Even though there is no explosion, the pipe organs and gospel vocal scales eat away at you.
“Without the darkness there is no light. So I let my darkness have the light. I can’t fight the truth. Life is difficult and painful,” Kesha tells Nylon. “It is for everyone. An artist doesn’t exist to make others happy. I believe an artist gives voice, motion, color to the emotions we all have. The good emotions, and the unmanageably fucking miserable ones.”
“Fine Line” catalogs the years-long legal suit of Kesha being forced to release music under her alleged abuser, Dr. Luke’s label. Her lyrical venom never quite makes the production “pop” yet the steady bubbling is all-the-more eerie and alluring. “There’s a fine line between what’s entertaining / And what’s just exploiting the pain / But, hey, look at all the money we made off me.” Although this is Kesha’s last contract album with Dr. Luke, the case goes to trial July 2023.
What do you think of Kesha’s new single’s “Fine Line” and “Eat The Acid”? Pre-order her fifth-studio album, Gag Order, here.
