Hitting play on Kim Petras’ new single “If Jesus Was a Rockstar,” you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognizing it as her. This is the woman who traditionally takes a bigger-is-better approach to her music, stiletto-stomping her way through flirty club bangers like “Malibu” and “Coconuts,” channeling her murderous alter ego every Halloween season with her pair of Turn Off The Light mixtapes, and, most recently, exposing her X-rated fantasies on an EP called Slut Pop.
“If Jesus Was a Rockstar,” out Friday, is decidedly mellow in comparison; an acoustic-guitar driven rumination on spirituality that’s still as polished and catchy as Petras’ previous work, but not nearly as capital-D Dramatic. To hear the 30-year-old pop star tell it, that was entirely on purpose.
“I think the point of this song is taking away the bells and whistles and the extreme, over-exaggerated characters that I’ve created in the past, especially on Slut Pop and Turn Off the Light,” she told The Daily Beast, in a recent conversation over Zoom. “It’s the first time that it’s not an escapist song, and it’s about how I feel as a human in the world right now. It’s the first time that I just felt like the song was meaningful enough to stand by itself.”
As “nerve-wracking” as it is to dig into a more vulnerable side of her music, Petras says there was just too much “messed-up shit” going on in the world for her to simply, as she puts it, “make up a fictional universe where everything is cool and OK.”
With the lead single from her upcoming major-label debut album (more on that later), she wanted to write about something that affects both her and a lot of her fans: feeling excluded from the institution of religion. “If Jesus Was a Rockstar,” she explains, is a call for inclusion about creating her own kind of badass Christ figure: “If Jesus was a rockstar / Livin’ like a party every day and divin’ off the stage… Then I’d wanna be just like him,” she sings on the chorus.
“With religion, it’s just been a thing that I never even had a chance to fit into, because religion never accepted trans people, and I’ve been trans my whole life,” she explains. “When I was a kid and all my friends would go to [receive] Communion and things like that, I was never a part of it. It was just never an option for me. But I still was curious and wanted to know. I think religion was really the first thing where it was like, OK, I am not wanted or accepted here, and I’m on my own.
“And the song is kind of a thought of, well, if everyone was equal and accepted in spirituality, then maybe I would have wanted to be a part of it and maybe I’d be a different person,” she adds. “But also, I found my own version of spirituality through that. It’s honestly about, I wish everyone got treated the same.”
Between “If Jesus Was a Rockstar” and her feature on Sam Smith’s “Unholy”—which recently hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—religion has inadvertently become a theme in Petras’ music this year. It’s something she’s thought a lot about lately, especially as she’s watched religion play into political conversations around abortion laws and LGBT rights in the U.S. Petras has lived in California for six years but is still a citizen of her native Germany, and says she would “love to be an American citizen” one day so she can vote, especially on the issues that personally affect her as a transgender person.
“It’s such a thing going on in the world right now, of judgment and what’s right and what’s wrong and who can do what to their bodies and who can’t,” she says. “Inequality is so obvious right now, and I think religion plays a huge part into that, and I just feel like now is the time that I needed to talk about my relationship to it.”
That feeling only intensified earlier this year after she released Slut Pop, a seven-track tour through all her salacious sexcapades. Erotic as that EP was, it also wasn’t anything Petras’ cisgender contemporaries haven’t been doing for decades—and yet it struck a nerve for even those in Petras’ own life.
“I made Slut Pop, which is like this super insanely sexual thing. And all of a sudden, friends of my family would hit up my parents and my sister and be like, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of Kim for doing this?’ A lot of people reacted really mean and judgmental about that, and I think that just really triggered me to get into what is shameful, what is sinful, and what is not,” she says. “I don’t consider sex, for example, to be sinful, and I don’t consider being transgender or being gay as sinful, but so many people still do. And I think with abortion laws and stuff like that, it really is a thing that speaks to me as a trans woman, too, because I needed to adjust my body to who I am inside. And had I not been able to do that and had I not had control over my own body and my own life, I don’t know if I would be alive.”
Vitally, “Unholy” was not only the first No. 1 single for both Petras and Smith, but also the first time a publicly transgender solo artist, Petras, or a publicly nonbinary solo artist, Smith, has notched a chart-topping song on the Hot 100. The two were together in London when they got the news—she joined Smith onstage at the Royal Albert Hall two nights in a row—and says she “definitely cried hard,” admitting it “still feels like it was a lucky accident.”
It’s the kind of feat that’s both amazing and daunting, considering how historic it is. When I profiled Petras in 2019, she was grappling with the fact that as one of the first and only mainstream transgender pop stars, there was really no blueprint for her to follow; she was kind of making it up for herself as she went along. At the time, she talked about that wearily, as if it was a burden, but now, she seems to more fully grasp and appreciate the importance of being a trailblazer.
“I feel lucky. And I do feel now, years later, a strong responsibility because I was friends with Sophie, who’s a trans artist who really meant so much to me, and who passed away and who always told me that I’m going to go and change the world,” she says, referencing the Scottish producer and DJ who died in 2021. “I feel like I carry that with me and the legacy of so many trans artists before me that I have listened to my whole life and have inspired me my whole life, who never got to see this point and really see the influence of trans musicians. Because I always argue that there’s been amazing trans musicians for my whole life, but they never got the platform or the chances or opportunities that I’ve gotten just because the world wasn’t ready for them ,or because people would gatekeep them and take from them and then not mention them.”
She continued: “So I feel this intense pressure to carry that torch for the trans artists who have made this possible for me, but also to highlight the humanity in trans people. And it’s not about me being a trans artist all the time. It’s about me being a good musician.”
That’s something Petras says with newfound assertiveness, as she’s attempting to prove to those who’d written her off as a shock-inducing provocateur that she’s a formidable writer and musician. On “If Jesus Was a Rockstar,” for example, she got to flex her skills in front of one of her musical heroes: the veteran pop hitmaker Max Martin.
She’d worked with the producer ILYA on “Unholy,” and after deciding to link up on more songs together, Petras went into his studio one day to find Martin there, who’s crafted some of the biggest singles of the past few decades. (To name just a few: Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time,” Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.”)
“I’m kind of glad I didn’t know that he was there that day, because I would have died of being nervous,” Petras said of the “magical experience” of working with Martin, whose work she’s studied for years. “But then I walked into the room and he was just a normal person. So it was cool to do it together in the studio and be like, OK, I’m good enough of a songwriter now to be in the same studio with you and to have my own opinion.”
Petras says it was a crucial reminder of how far she’s come as a musician—one who started out making commercial jingles in Germany before spending years sharpening her tools as a songwriter, popping up as a frequent featured vocalist in the club scene, and, eventually, becoming a solo artist herself.
“I’m quite a nervous person and quite a private person, even though my public persona is very extroverted and very out there and very bratty,” she says. “I actually am quite a shy person and I often feel like, in rooms, I definitely used to just shut up and write because maybe I’m being ‘too transgender’ or ‘too gay’ or any of those things. And now it’s like I can be in those rooms and be myself and know that I deserve to be there and that I’ve worked really hard to be there and that I can have my own opinion.”
All of that hard work will soon culminate in Petras’ first major-label album, which she’s been working on since the beginning of this year. She’d had another album’s worth of songs, called Problématique, that she finished at the end of lockdown and that leaked online in August—a crushing experience that she now diplomatically describes as a blessing in disguise.
“Honestly, it was what I wrote during the pandemic, and it was very extravagant, escapist pop. An up-tempo extravaganza,” she says. “I have a completely new album that is exactly what I want to say and that just feels like a real evolution of myself. For the first time I didn’t just make music to escape, but I was actually present in the world. I think it’s very unexpected and exciting. Problématique, I love you forever, and it’s out there if you want to listen to it. But I’m just in a different place.”
With Problématique fully scrapped, she says her as-yet-untitled new album should be done by the end of this year. She’s spent the past several months flying around the world, working with some old collaborators and some new ones.
She would not disclose whether or not Dr. Luke, her longtime producer who’s currently embroiled in a defamation lawsuit with Kesha, has any involvement on the new record—he had been credited on all her published work through Slut Pop, but was noticeably absent from both “Unholy” and “If Jesus Was a Rockstar.” She did, however, reveal that she worked with prolific pop producer Ian Kirkpatrick for the first time, and confirmed that she made more songs with Martin and with Cirkut, who produced some of her early singles, including “Heart to Break” and “I Don’t Want It At All.”
Petras tells me the album is inspired by lore, religion, fairytales, horror movies, and Greek mythology. “It’s a quite ambitious concept for this record,” she says. “It’s very much just all of my interests combined into one and it makes this really exciting cocktail of pop music.”
At long last, between “Unholy’s” astounding chart success and Republic Records making Petras, as she describes, a “priority” by scoring her big-name collaborators, it seems there’s more momentum on her side than ever before, paving the way for a huge year for her in 2023.
“I’ve built my core fanbase for years, and it finally feels like I am being respected and taken seriously because it was a lot of, ‘You just make gay music or trans music’ and ‘You’re niche.’ It’s been ten years of being told that,” she says. “And now, finally, those doors have been kicked down. I think it’s a mixture of the world changing and me just making better music than ever before, and having grown as an artist and as a songwriter.
“It’s like the whole world just suddenly was ready for me to happen.”
