Kesha Gag Order Review: A Disarmingly Strange Musical Thesis Statement

You’d be hard-pressed to find a stranger mainstream pop album released in the first half of 2023 than Kesha’s Gag Order. Its disarming opening tracks, the menacing yet briefly celestial “Something to Believe In” and the dark-wave minimalist “Eat the Acid,” wouldn’t feel out of place on, say, an Anna Meredith album. Save for the vintage soul-sampling “Only Love Can Save Us Now” and the gaudy, Auto-Tune-steeped “Peace & Quiet,” the majority of the material here is more art-pop than anything Kesha has released to date.

Gag Order is, in form and content, a total rebuke of the party-girl image that Kesha presented on albums like Cannibal, and yet it’s somehow even freakier. The spartan “Fine Line” is cleverly centered around two different accruing tensions: a pulsating bassline that frequently creeps through the low-frequency mix, as an emotionally despondent Kesha sings about the “fine line” between “genius and crazy”; and the dissipating boundary between “hope and delusion,” acknowledging how little separates “lettin’ go and givin’ up” in the eyes of the general public. Throughout the song, the push-and-pull dynamic of public and private life continues to teeter between these contrasting states of being, threatening to collapse at any second.

The album’s remaining tracks aren’t as immediately sober-minded or straight-edged in terms of positioning Kesha as no longer playing polite after years of legally bound silence. But they do a good job of showcasing her vocal talents while also providing Gag Order with a few interesting curveballs, such as the acoustic “Living in My Head” and the gentle “All I Need Is You.”

The album loses steam around its midpoint, with the psychedelic electronic freak-out session of “The Drama” and the proud-to-be-a-problem anthem “Hate Me Harder.” Many of the songs’ songwriting components—hooks, melodies, structures—are often underdeveloped, putting the focus instead on their odd aural elements. The album admirably tries on a large array of sounds and styles, from the experimental lo-fi of its first few tracks to its more baroque back half, but it’s undermined by shoddy production choices like an overreliance on dreary synth sounds.

Still, Kesha has said that making Gag Order felt like she was “giving birth to the most intimate thing” she’s ever created, and, on that front, it delivers. Despite some slipshod sequencing and periodic bouts of pretension, the album manages to articulate a working thesis for Kesha’s artistry that exists independently from the apparatus of purely commercial exhibitionism.