What Is Kim Petras Doing?

Photo: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Not all sequel albums are bogus retreads or lazy marketing ploys. For every Migos Culture III, a bloated record that added nothing new to the trio’s sound or cultural impact, there’s Lil Wayne’s hook-heavy Tha Carter III; for every leaden Rob Zombie Hellbilly Deluxe 2, there’s the cinematic grandeur of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II, which helped relaunch his career.

Kim Petras is no Meat Loaf (or Wayne). Her latest offering, Slut Pop Miami, a sequel to her delightfully sleazy 2022 EP Slut Pop, revisits the same sex-positive pop aesthetic without a hint of sexiness. It sounds like someone asked a pornographic AI to make music (something Only Fire has already done just better). Almost everything that once made Petras’s work feel so distinct sounds intentionally pared back.

Petras’s impulse to resurrect one of her most beloved eras is somewhat understandable. Her previous two albums, Feed the Beast and Problématique, sounded like a collection of nondescript demos and failed to capitalize on the success of her chart-topping Sam Smith collab “Unholy” (Beast landed at No. 44 on the Billboard 200; Problématique missed it entirely). As the ensuing tour struggled with low-ticket-sale rumors, Petras was left in an awkward spot, far from the boundary-pushing work of her early years yet unable to replicate her brief moment of mainstream success.

In the aftermath, it’s easy to picture a frantic Team Petras meeting where massive whiteboards with the words SLUT POP are circled in red Expo marker. (Fans loved it once, and they will again!) Slut Pop might have been rudimentary — especially for an artist who collaborated with A.G. Cook and SOPHIE and once dabbled in such expansive genres as gothic pop and sweeping synth ballads — but it hit like a sugar rush. While NSFW contemporaries like Slayyyter and Cupcakke were pivoting to tamer fare, Petras was filling a post-pandemic hole for unapologetic horniness. No song overstayed its welcome, and tracks like “XXX” and “Throat Goat” were played in every gay club from Redline to the Rosemont. You could feel sweat dripping from each line as she sang about the sheer pleasure of sex.

Slut Pop Miami replaces that rapturous lust for mechanical routine. Petras’s interest in returning to a well-executed era doesn’t distract from its newfound feeling of cheapness. “Butt Slutt” is a laughably boring, first-draft house song with Mad Libs lyrics (“Hanky panky / Daddy Yankee”). “Head Head Honcho” features the tediously inane couplet “I’m a penis genius / I’m a semen Jesus.” Each song has an inexplicable five co-writers, a remarkable number when you hear Petras sing things like “I like six-packs / I like beaches / I like sushi / I like Britney” over mind-numbing club beats. And while setting Slut Pop in an inherently sexy city like Miami is a great idea on paper, it’s not represented on the record in anything other than the title (unless we’re counting the vaguely offensive “Cubana,” which alludes to the city’s large Cuban population through Petras’s Spanglish and references to a cigar-size phallus).

Instead of Slut Pop Miami, Petras should have leaned into the instincts that made her Era 1 singles so successful. On “Heart to Break,” “1,2,3 dayz up,” and “If U Think About Me …,” you could hear her deep appreciation for pop music and a desire to expand into new sounds. Her features on songs by Charli XCX and Cheat Codes showed a penchant for collaborating with innovative artists. Petras needed to continue down this path. She could have lent her signature warble to underground genres like jungle or avant-garde artpop à la Rosalía, or the new wave of glitch-heavy hyperpop. (Though doing so would likely require her to finally move away from Dr. Luke and the team that guided her here in the first place, which Petras seems intent on avoiding.)

In revisiting a concept she’s already exhausted, Petras leaves herself open to diminishing returns. It’s a disappointing indicator that there’s nothing else in the ideas bucket besides nostalgia and sets a risky precedent for the future. Kim Petras has now spent her still-young career looking backward twice (see: Turn Off the Light Vol. 2); even Problématique was an official release of a previously shelved record. If all she knows how to do is build upon her prior work, what happens when there’s no new work to build upon?