Kesha Announces New Rick Rubin-Produced Album 'Gag Order'
It's arriving May 19
She also talks about "Fine Line," describing it as being about "all the doctors and lawyers [who] cut the tongue out of my mouth… But hey, look at all the money we made off me."
"I wrote 'TiK ToK,' and 'the party don't start 'til I walk in,' so I almost felt like I was becoming a caricature of this toxic positivity," she continues. "We live in a culture where I feel like we always show our best side. But Rick Rubin created the most beautiful, safe space for me to really dive into these emotions."
"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. It is for everyone," Kesha wrote in a statement about the album. "An artist doesn't exist to make others happy. I believe an artist gives voice, motion, colour to the emotions we all have. The good emotions, and the unmanageably fucking miserable ones."
Last month, Kesha took to Instagram to tease an unreleased song that sampled the Ramones and was co-written by Kurt Vile — we'll have to see whether it makes it onto Gag Order.
Kesha's last album was 2020's High Road.
New developments have also been made in Kesha's ongoing legal saga against Dr. Luke; last week, the pop star's lawyers went to the New York Court of Appeals in an attempt to overturn a prior ruling that determined Dr. Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) is a private figure rather than a public one, which means he's not obligated to pay Kesha's legal fees or be subject to a retroactive application of the 2020 amendments to the anti-strategic lawsuit against public participation (anti-SLAPP) law.
Dr. Luke's defamation case against Kesha — which stems from her original suit against the producer for allegedly rendering her unconscious and raping her, among a litany of other accusations, including sexual, physical and emotional abuse — will go to trial on July 26 after being postponed from February.