The opening track of Kesha’s fourth album, High Road, begins with a piano melody in the key of Cheers, followed by a life-affirming refrain about “the best night of our lives.” But, then, “Tonight” abruptly pivots to a flurry of 808s and Kesha’s half-rapped, half-slurred admission that she can’t find her phone. If that sounds awfully familiar, that’s precisely the point. “Woke up this morning, feeling myself/Hungover as hell like 2012,” she quips on the following track, “My Own Dance,” an obvious nod to her breakout hit “Tik Tok.”
If 2017’s Rainbow proved that Kesha didn’t need producer-cum-svengali Dr. Luke to create compelling pop music, High Road is an attempt to show those who lamented her shift away from party anthems that people are messy, complicated creatures, capable of being more than one thing at the same time. The album’s first single, “Raising Hell,” is a gospel-tinged rave-up that provides a bridge between Kesha’s breakout sound and the more reflective, roots-inspired Rainbow. It’s admittedly hard not to long for Dr. Luke’s euphoric EDM hooks, but the album’s ferocious opening salvo makes clear that even when she wasn’t the one navigating, Kesha has always been in the driver’s seat.
By the album’s midpoint, she returns to the heart-on-her-sleeve introspection of songs like “Praying,” even making melodic reference to that momentous single during the coda of the midtempo “Shadow.” The next track, “Cowboy Blues,” is a meditative acoustic ballad that finds the singer examining the ways in which loneliness can cloud one’s instincts (“They say you’ll know when you know/What do you do when you don’t?”), while the country-inflected “Resentment” transcends the genre’s typical narrative of a woman scorned (“I don’t hate you, babe, it’s worse than that”).
From Brian Wilson to Sturgill Simpson to Big Freedia, the guest artists featured throughout High Road are as disparate as the songs themselves. “The Potato Song (Cuz I Want To)” is a silly, vaudevillian rejection of grown-up things, while “Birthday Suit” is pure retro pop, complete with glitchy sound effects inspired by Super Mario Bros. And despite “Ke$ha” receiving a guest credit on “Kinky,” the track is more of a throwback to early ’90s R&B than to the Auto-Tuned electro-pop of the early 2010s.
Those mottled sounds make High Road Kesha’s least consistent album to date, at least sonically. But there’s a clear emotional through line from the joyous, unapologetic bombast of the album’s first third to the naked vulnerability of “Father Daughter Dance,” in which Kesha deliberates on the absence of a formative relationship in her life (“The worst part of this is I’m not even sad/How do I miss something I never had?”), and the rapture of the gospel-infused closing track, “Chasing Thunder.” With High Road, Kesha has found a way to double back and carve out a comfortable, if not happy, middle ground.
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