Kesha

Rainbow

Instead of dwelling on what isn’t said on the record, she chooses to use her experiences to find the strength to move on. And so we get the most authentic Kesha album yet, and it’s a triumph.

It’s a bold, focused, universal statement about freedom—from self-hatred, from paralyzing internal conflicts, from gender expectations, from negative influences, and (especially) from other people’s shit.

Californian pop hero Kesha returns with a defiant country and garage rock-tinged triumph.

Kesha channels that drama into the best music of her career – finding common ground between the honky-tonks she loves and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," between glossy beats, epic ballads and grimy guitar riffs.

Sometimes she'll slide into cliché, usually by recycling therapy-speak, but how she pairs these credos with veiled confessions is as striking and moving as her party songs are weird and funny. By slyly alternating between these two extremes throughout Rainbow, Kesha winds up with a comeback that's fully realized emotionally and musically.

The suggestion Rainbow successfully posits is that the woman who lurked somewhere behind the Ke$ha image might be every bit as fierce and screw-you as her persona, and a substantially more eclectic and idiosyncratic musical force to boot.

The result is a revelation. Where previous albums had been bland landfill electro-pop rendered even more indistinguishable through her heavily autotuned vocals, Rainbow offers a range of approaches, from pop and R&B to country and funk, applied to material that brings greater depth to her characteristic sassy attitude.

The extraordinary vision that Kesha has put forth ensures that in due course, Rainbow will be remembered on its own merits: not only as the unquestionable best album she’s ever put out, but also one of 2017’s finest pop releases.

Rainbow ... is musically backdated but emotionally upgraded, replacing dumb thrills with vocal skills and genuine personality.

While the drastic shift in musical styling that drives Rainbow's 14 tracks risks sounding jumbled, Kesha tastefully executes each genre she dabbles in.

Rainbow is simply the record she needed to make. And at a time where most pop music is either designed by committee or drowning in beigeness, it’s also the kind of individual and achingly honest record we needed to hear.

“Defiant” may be a term too often misused in an age of empowerment feminism, but it’s absolutely fitting for this album.