Most people who listen to popular music don’t spend much time reading the credits. So producers who want to make sure their work is recognized occasionally mark their creations with what’s known as a producer tag—an audible watermark near the beginning of the track. Metro Boomin, one of the dominant hip-hop producers of the twenty-tens, sometimes used a sample of the rapper Future, one of his clients, saying, “If young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot you.” Take a Daytrip, a duo behind many of Lil Nas X’s biggest hits, had a more celebratory tag: “Daytrip took it to ten!” A few years ago, a pop-obsessed German immigrant named Kim Petras decided that she needed a producer tag of her own, as part of her plan to achieve musical ubiquity. Petras is not, in fact, a producer but a songwriter and a singer. The tag she created was, like her music, enthusiastic and more than a little absurd: “Woo Ah!” The “Woo” is high, like a siren; the “Ah!” is breathy, like a sigh.
In short order, “Woo Ah” took over the world. Or, at any rate, the Kim Petras world, which was a bit smaller and a lot more vivid than the one most people lived in. Her fans called themselves Bunheads, for the off-center coil that Petras wore in her hair, and they treated Petras like the pop star she wanted to be. On Twitter, some of them celebrated #InternationalWooAhDay on August 1st, which was the anniversary of the day, in 2017, that she released her first single, “I Don’t Want It at All.” In 2019, fans sold out Petras’s show in New York, at Irving Plaza, which holds about a thousand people. It was a warm night in June, Pride Month, and the audience of Bunheads, largely male and gay, was happy to take direction. Before the music started, a robotic prerecorded voice came through the speakers. “When I say ‘Woo,’ you say, ‘Ah,’ ” it intoned. “Failure to comply will be grounds for immediate ejection from the premises.”
Moments later, Petras emerged, wearing wraparound sunglasses and an oversized sports coat, neither of which lasted long. Her show compressed big-room energy into a medium-sized room. There were two costume changes, dozens of photogenic poses, and hardly any lyrics that the crowd didn’t sing back to the stage, twice as loud. Introducing “I Don’t Want It at All,” Petras called it “the song that cemented my place as a brand-new pop queen.” It is perfectly pop, an ode to expensive clothes (and, by extension, to the kind of man who might buy them as a gift), with a pastel video starring Petras’s friend Paris Hilton as her fairy godmother. But the song had remained an underground favorite, not a radio hit. On that night, it was not clear whether Petras would ever become a real star—although it was clear that, in a different sense, she already was one. On the way out of the club, you could buy a “Woo Ah!” baseball cap, secure in the knowledge that people who saw it generally wouldn’t know what it meant. (I did, and they didn’t.)
These days, Petras’s quest for ubiquity is a lot closer to its goal. Last year, she collaborated with the English pop star Sam Smith on a song called “Unholy,” which went to the top of the pop chart, becoming one of those songs which you hear whether you want to or not. On “Saturday Night Live,” Smith sang it dressed in a voluminous pink tulle gown—voluminous enough, in fact, to conceal Petras. After the chorus, she suddenly emerged from between Smith’s legs to sing her verse, in which she slips into character as a rich man’s bratty sugar baby: “Mm, daddy, daddy, if you want it, drop the addy / Give me love, give me Fendi, my Balenciaga daddy.” (Petras has declined to clarify whether “addy” means “address” or “Adderall,” but it probably does not mean “attitude”—in her songs, nobody ever seems to drop the attitude.) In February, at the Grammy Awards, Smith and Petras were introduced by Madonna, and performed a version of “Unholy” that seemed to be set in a satanic night club: fire, cages, red leather. Even better, Smokey Robinson presented them with a Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, and Petras began her acceptance speech by mentioning something that some of her listeners already knew, although maybe not all of them. “I am the first transgender woman to win this award,” she said, and the cameras caught Taylor Swift, among others, standing and applauding.
“I don’t think I would have been able to handle the whole ‘Unholy’ thing without having been in the industry for years,” Petras told me, the following month. It was a gray morning in New York, and she was sitting in an apartment that belonged to her publicist, sipping Veuve Clicquot in honor of someone on her team, who was celebrating a birthday. She was dressed casually, but not carelessly, in wide-legged stonewashed jeans and Lanvin skateboard sneakers, and she seemed unfazed by the fact that her Grammy performance had not been met with universal acclaim. Senator Ted Cruz had retweeted a clip of it, with the verdict: “This . . . is . . . evil.”
For someone in Petras’s line of work, the judgment of a Republican senator is generally less consequential than the judgment of that heterogeneous mass of people who constitute the audience for pop music, and whose tastes can be hard to predict, even for someone as well versed in pop history as Petras is. “I’m one of the biggest pop studiers,” she told me, suddenly sounding more like a German fan than like an American star. (She claims to have learned English by watching Britney Spears interviews on YouTube.) Petras was preparing to release a single called “Alone,” which is a kind of pop-history project: it is built atop the beeping beat of “Better Off Alone,” the 1999 global hit by Alice Deejay, a Dutch group. To turn the song into an event, Petras had recruited Nicki Minaj, who gave her not only a guest verse but a new nickname: Kim Petty. Petras said, “All my friends and me were, like, ‘How the fuck didn’t we come up with that?’ ”
On June 23rd, Petras will release her major-label début album, “Feed the Beast,” on Republic Records; it was named for advice given to her by a label executive, who kept urging her to make more music for the company to sell. For Petras, the all-consuming nature of the music industry is part of the fun. Being truly pop means being widely palatable, and it also means risking public rejection. “It’s like when the gorgeous girl gets fed to the beast—but the beast doesn’t want to eat her,” she told me. “What will make you want to eat me?”
Petras once described herself as having “crazy nonsensical confidence,” which seems as good an explanation as any for how she got from the German suburb of Uckerath, outside Cologne, to the Grammy stage. She was born in 1992, and says that she knew from a young age that she was a girl. At the age of twelve, she persuaded her parents to help her find the right doctor and began medical treatment. In the years that followed, she found community in the gay clubs of Cologne. She says that she also knew, with similar conviction, that she was a pop star. While in high school, she talked her way into a local music studio and eventually earned a songwriting contract with Universal Germany. She attained musical success, of a sort, composing advertising jingles. In her spare time, she sang covers on YouTube, and at nineteen she went to Los Angeles, with not much besides a plan to connect with some music people she had met online. Stories like this typically end in disappointment, or worse, but Petras had a canny approach: instead of selling herself to executives as a potential star, she sold herself to songwriters and producers as a fellow music nerd. She soon met Aaron Joseph, who had a small publishing deal with Prescription Songs, the company formed by Lukasz Gottwald, the hitmaking impresario known as Dr. Luke. Joseph should probably have been developing a catalogue of songs that he could pitch to established stars, but instead he found himself helping Petras write material that fit both her campy sensibility and her voice, which is loud and raucous, like a record on the verge of distorting.
Pop music, broadly defined, includes just about any song that lots of people love. But there is also a narrower definition of pop, one that cohered in the nineteen-eighties, and that may still evoke the eighties today: bright melodies, synthesizers, club-inspired rhythms, outrageous fashion, a hint of mischief. In short, Madonna, and anyone who even slightly resembles her. Music might be recognizably “pop,” in this sense, even if it’s not actually popular. Joseph and Petras shared an intense interest in pop music, including more marginal acts like Baltimora, the Italian group behind the 1985 hit “Tarzan Boy.” Alex Chapman, a producer and d.j. who is known for headlining high-profile gay parties, met Petras a few years later, and was for a time her roommate. He, too, was struck by her enthusiasm for pop arcana. “We love a trashy pop moment,” Chapman says.
By the time Petras and Joseph started building a résumé, in the mid-twenty-tens, pop stars like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga were no longer so dominant, and the songs on the radio were growing slower and moodier, under the influence of hip-hop and R. & B. In that context, Petras’s brash, upbeat sound seemed either behind the times or ahead of them. Petras remembers wondering, “Why do I have to want to make girly, gay pop music when no one’s listening to it—why is that my gift?” In 2015, she and Joseph travelled to New York to perform for the C.E.O. of Epic Records. It was Petras’s first time in New York, and they had no money for a cab; they arrived at the record company frazzled, played a few songs for the gathered executives, and flew back to California, with no clear idea what to do next. Eventually, Petras signed a contract—not with a major record company but with Gottwald, who had taken an interest in his protégé’s protégé. Gottwald became Petras’s constant collaborator, helping to write, produce, and release her songs, sometimes under a pseudonym; her major-label début is being issued by Republic through Gottwald’s imprint, Amigo Records.
Gottwald helped create the sound of twenty-first-century pop, co-writing candy-sweet hits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.,” and Doja Cat’s “Say So.” He is also notorious, because of allegations made by Kesha, a former client, who says that he drugged and sexually assaulted her. Gottwald denied having ever had sexual contact with Kesha, and in 2016 a judge dismissed her legal claims; Gottwald has accused Kesha of defamation, and the trial is scheduled to begin this summer. At times, Petras’s professional association with Gottwald has been a liability, and in a 2018 interview with NME, the British music site, she seemed to defend him, saying, “I would like my fans to know that I wouldn’t work with somebody I believe to be an abuser of women, definitely not.” A few months later, she made a more conciliatory—or maybe more lawyerly—statement on Twitter. “While I’ve been open and honest about my positive experience with Dr. Luke, that does not negate or dismiss the experience of others or suggest that multiple perspectives cannot exist at once,” she wrote. “I didn’t communicate this clearly in the past.” Petras no longer talks about Gottwald in interviews; perhaps she calculates that people who think it’s unconscionable to work with him aren’t likely to be persuaded otherwise.
Thanks in part to the success of “Unholy,” Petras can now work with just about any songwriter she likes, which explains how she found herself, one day in April, in a Hollywood music studio, participating in the kind of all-star writing session that she once dreamed of. The biggest name was David Guetta, the French producer and d.j., who helped teach Americans to love the kind of euphoric dance music that has long been popular in Europe; his résumé includes “I Gotta Feeling,” by the Black Eyed Peas, and “Titanium,” featuring Sia. Sarah Hudson was there, too (Katy Perry, “Dark Horse”; Dua Lipa, “Levitating”), as well as Rami Yacoub, a Swede who has worked on an astonishing list of hits stretching back to Britney Spears’s “. . . Baby One More Time,” which still sounds, nearly a quarter century later, like just about the most devastating pop song ever loosed upon the world. Petras was excited, or maybe just nervous. “I’m pacing,” she said, to the room. “I’ve always been a pacing kinda bitch.”
Guetta had an idea: he thought Petras might want to write something based on “Sans Contrefaçon,” a 1987 hit by Mylène Farmer, a French pop star. He cued it up. “It’s like ABBA,” Petras said, approvingly.
Guetta went online to find a translation of the lyrics. The title might be rendered, rather awkwardly, as “Without Counterfeit”—or, with some poetic license, as “Honestly.” The song revolves around a confession: roughly, “Since we have to choose, I’ll say it softly / I’m a boy, honestly.” The lyrics are evocative and enigmatic, with a stray reference to the Chevalier d’Éon, an eighteenth-century diplomat and spy who went undercover as a woman and lived that way for more than thirty years. “ ‘Alone in my closet,’ ” Guetta said, reading the translation. “That line is so crazy!”
Petras was curious, but not quite ready to dive in. “Why don’t we warm up with one of the funner ones?” she said, referring to some of the more upbeat song ideas. Soon she and Hudson were improvising lyrics about lust and destiny. “I love the concept of ‘I’m your fate,’ ” Petras said. “ ‘Is this meant to be, or we’re just meant to fuck?’ ” She had an idea. “Can I go just freestyle some shit?” she said, and slipped into the recording booth to try out phrases, the way a guitarist might try out riffs. “Automobiles and diamond rings,” she sang. “Let me beee,” she added, pushing the last word up the scale. “ ’Cause I don’t really care!”
This last phrase was the one that resonated, and soon the pop scientists were trying to create something around it. Petras is known for her vocal range, and for her maximalist approach to songcraft. Shortly after she moved to California, she booked some songwriting sessions with the pop star JoJo, who remembers marvelling at her musical curiosity. “She was like an elastic band,” JoJo recalls. “She would just keep stretching herself and trying new ideas.” These days, Petras’s songs tend to be concise but dense: “Malibu,” a 2020 single that channels Michael Jackson, has a stop, a start, and a key change shortly before the two-minute mark; instead of adding a bridge, after the second verse, Petras might instead “fuck with the second-verse melody,” to add variation without sacrificing brevity. Still, she is aware that a great pop song probably shouldn’t sound too virtuosic. “I think the interesting part of pop is ‘Where do you stupefy it?’ ” she says. “Because the funnest parts to shout along with in the club are the stupid parts.” Petras has written countless song lyrics through the years, but the one that really changed her life was the one that began, “Mm, daddy, daddy.”
When Petras pulled into another music studio, the next day, she was wearing the same black Balenciaga basketball shorts she had been wearing the day before. “I slept in this,” she said. “I’m disgusting.” She lives in Beachwood Canyon with her three dogs, and she had spent the night thinking about “Sans Contrefaçon.” She and the other writers had eventually managed to transform it into a new song—not quite a cover, or a remix, but something that retained both the beat and the concept. “I was up till 3 A.M., listening to a shitty voice memo and trying to come up with verse two,” she said. (For someone with easy access to top-quality audio equipment, she spends a lot of time listening to rough mixes, rerecorded through an iPhone.) “It’s about this girl who says, ‘If I had a choice, I would be a boy’—so we kinda flipped that whole shit,” she told me. “I’ve never made a trans-related-subject song.”
Petras’s long and willful journey toward celebrity began, in a sense, with a journey away from it. As a teen-ager, she gave interviews and wrote blog posts about her transition, and was featured in documentaries and articles. “Every single one was called, like, ‘From Boy to Girl,’ ‘From Tim to Kim,’ ” she says. “I was kind of, like, a joke in Germany, a little bit.” In 2009, when she was sixteen, the Daily Mail called her “the world’s youngest transsexual,” and quoted her doctor, who said, “To the best of my knowledge, Kim is the youngest sex-change patient in the world.” A few years later, she sat for an ABC News interview with Cynthia McFadden, who described her as both a pioneer and an aspiring pop singer. “It might seem hard, but still so plain to see / This is the real me,” she sang; the earnest lyrics seemed straightforwardly autobiographical.
In general, Petras didn’t tell executives she met in her early years that she was trans, although she knew that they would discover her story when they Googled her. “We weren’t hiding it, but we weren’t leading with it,” Joseph recalls. Instead of singing about living her truth, Petras drew inspiration from the gay night clubs in Cologne, and from the kind of intense but campy pop that thrives in these clubs. Ty Sunderland, an event producer and d.j. who helped popularize Petras in New York’s gay club scene, discovered her on Spotify, without knowing anything about her, and was immediately smitten. “Gay people love divas, we love women, we love drag queens,” he said. “These larger-than-life female personalities.” Petras found that it was liberating to be able to be herself without revealing herself. “I don’t want to talk about my life stories, because it’s too personal,” she told me. “So I love making up characters.”
In the past six years, part of the fun of being a Petras fan has been following along as she tries on different styles and moods. Bunheads sometimes talk about her “neon” era, referring to a batch of peppy, infernally catchy songs that were released as stand-alone singles, with neon covers, beginning in 2017. There was a two-part collection called “Turn Off the Light,” with punishingly hard beats and playfully monstrous lyrics, inspired by her favorite horror movies. “Coconuts,” a fan-favorite single, turns out not to be about tropical fruit. And last year Petras released “Slut Pop,” which included a track called “Throat Goat,” an ode both to oral sex and to Petras’s fluttery, throaty vibrato—which can sound, as many people have told her, distinctly caprine. “Clarity,” her 2019 independent album, is viewed by fans as a classic: thirty-eight minutes of vivid melodies, by turns silly and severe. Or, to quote a piece of fan fiction written by @thatswiftbitch, one of the most exuberant Bunheads on Twitter, “Kim walked into that studio, did 5 lines of coke, texted Aaron Joseph ‘lol come on queer,’ put her CLIT directly on the mic for 2 hours and hit record. 12/10.”
At times, some of the people who want to support her haven’t known quite what to make of all these poses and reinventions. In 2018, Pitchfork published an op-ed scrutinizing Petras’s “carefree, upbeat, and markedly apolitical vibe,” and suggesting that she might better serve trans fans by “speaking out on behalf of trans issues.” Petras seems to have grown increasingly careful about how she talks about trans identity, perhaps aware that one stray quote might be enough to drown out the music she works so hard on. In 2018, talking to Gay Times about kids seeking gender-related surgery, she said, “I think the earlier the better.” But during a recent radio interview in which a fan asked whether she thought fourteen was too young for a medical transition, she emphasized the importance of professional medical advice. At other times, she relies upon irony and attitude, qualities that have generally served her well. In 2021, on TikTok, she posted a video of herself in a pool, enjoying the California sunshine while delivering a vocal-fried mission statement. “When I wake up in the morning, I do something really transgender, and then I make my trans breakfast, and then I shake my tits super transgenderly, all day, to ‘Coconuts,’ ” she said. “Yay! I’m so traaans!”
It is inevitable that Petras’s professional successes will also be viewed as trans milestones. Earlier this year, she was photographed for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and during a recent visit to Republic’s offices she was told, via Zoom, that she had made the cover. “This is, like, actually insane,” she said. “That means so much to little kids like me out there.” Avery Lipman, the C.O.O. of Republic, stopped by, and she told him the news. “Oh, my God,” he said. “When I was like twelve, the cover with Cheryl Tiegs—I actually still have that somewhere. So people are going to collect this thing forever.”
No one knew, though, what the reaction would be. Not long before, the trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney had posted a bit of sponsored content for Bud Light, leading to a backlash so severe that it depressed sales of the brand for months, and damaged the company’s stock price. As it happened, the revelation of Petras’s place on the cover was overshadowed by the image of one of her fellow cover models, Martha Stewart, who is eighty-one, and seemed to earn universal acclaim and envy. Even so, Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC News host, reacted by asking, on Australian television, “Why do we have to have a biological man, now, in a woman’s bathing suit, parading around on the cover of Sports Illustrated?” Petras grew up with a strong desire to be normal, coupled with a strong desire to be extraordinary, and her life, like the music she makes, is proof that those two desires aren’t necessarily incompatible. “I definitely wanted to fit in,” she said, remembering her teen-age years. “But it’s strange, because, like, what is the role of a trans pop singer?”
One of the people helping Petras navigate her growing celebrity is her manager, Larry Rudolph, whose previous clients include Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. He has been working with Petras since 2017, and in some ways his job has grown easier. “I used to have to explain who this girl is,” he told me. “Now I don’t have to explain anymore.” But some longtime fans have mixed feelings about Petras’s emergence from the underground. One Bunhead, @seanbeegee, posted a response to “Unholy” on Twitter:
Sunderland, the New York d.j., admits that “Unholy” became so played-out that he had to take it off his set lists for a while. “It had a moment when it was on the radio, all over TikTok, and you couldn’t escape,” he says. But the prohibition is now over. “The gay cycle of things,” he said. “First it’s tacky, now it’s camp.”
All musical communities have their pathologies, but there is something singular about the world of pop music, perhaps because of the width of the gap between the inspirational lyrics of the songs and the vicious judgments and rivalries of the fans. It is not enough for your fave to scale the pop chart; everyone else’s faves must also flop. Flopping is, in fact, essential to pop music. While a semi-popular singer-songwriter or a legendary techno d.j. can float along indefinitely in a haze of mild approval, a proper pop star must release a series of hits, which can’t hit unless just about everybody else’s would-be hits miss. Petras spent months teasing “Alone,” her Nicki Minaj collaboration, on TikTok, making sure that fans knew the beat and the hook before the song dropped, and encouraging them to “pre-save” it, so that streaming services would register a burst of interest when the song was released. It’s a well-made confection, though perhaps not as singular or as unhinged as Petras at her best. (You can almost imagine someone else singing it, which isn’t something that would ever be said of “Throat Goat.”) The song made its début at No. 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and has not yet become the kind of pop juggernaut that makes underground d.j.s flee in terror. Fans of rival stars gathered online to celebrate. Rudolph doesn’t pretend that Petras isn’t under pressure to deliver more hits. “Pop doesn’t really live underground—it either comes above ground or it doesn’t work,” he told me. “It doesn’t have to work tomorrow. It just has to work within a reasonable progression of time.”
When Sunderland first heard Petras’s music, in 2017, he was convinced that if he didn’t meet her soon she would become too famous for him. Six years later, some of her fans pine for the old days. “Feed the Beast” is actually her second major-label début; the first was “Problématique,” most of which was leaked online last summer, prompting her label to cancel its release. (Fans, naturally, created their own track lists and album art, and doubtless some of them especially loved the album because it didn’t officially exist.) Perhaps even more than that album, “Feed the Beast” leans into the alien sound of European dance music: the German upbringing that once made Petras seem an unlikely American success story is now part of her competitive advantage. One song on the album, an ode to unchecked hedonism called “Castle in the Sky,” was inspired by unpretentious German dance acts of the past, like Scooter and Blümchen; it rattles along at nearly a hundred and seventy beats per minute, which is much too fast to dance if you’re trying to look cool. “I feel like people are scared of that tempo,” Petras told me. “But I grew up wanting to be a raver.” Another new song, “Claws,” is built around a sample of a German yodel; it has already become a fan favorite, based on a snippet that Petras shared on an Instagram Live stream. This is Petras’s main objective during the next few weeks: making sure that her fans are as hungry as possible.
The tricky thing about pop music, though, is that it’s never just about the music. Part of Petras’s job is to be Kim Petras, which explains why, even as she was rushing to finish her album, she flew to New York this spring, for the Met Gala. When she attended in 2021, she had been dressed by the prankish designer Hillary Taymour, from Collina Strada, who put her in a bright-orange chest plate shaped into a startlingly realistic horse’s head—a “horset,” Taymour called it—with a matching floor-length orange braided ponytail. This year, Petras was dressed by Marc Jacobs, who put her in a complicated off-white-and-black outfit that made her look like a hastily wrapped Christmas present, complete with sequinned platform boots. “The shoes are actually the big star of the whole outfit,” Petras said, to a camera crew from German Vogue, as she got ready. To many people watching at home, the real star was, in fact, the small yellow vape pen that she was furtively clutching on the steps of the Met Gala.
While Petras was in town, she took the opportunity to do some press, including an appearance on “Elvis Duran and the Morning Show,” a radio broadcast recorded in midtown. Petras filled a greenroom with her travelling entourage, among them a hair stylist, a makeup artist, a videographer, a creative director, and various emissaries from her label and her management company. On the air, she talked to Duran about the Met Gala, her busy schedule, the success of “Unholy,” and her determination to persevere in the face of “backlash”; she also sat through a dramatic reading of some of the lyrics to “Throat Goat.” (“My finest work,” she said, when it was over.) Afterward, the entire crew piled into a Sprinter van to head downtown to Petras’s hotel, stopping briefly on the sidewalk outside for an impromptu photo shoot; she was wearing a matching lilac top and miniskirt, spangled and feathered, that deserved to be commemorated. As she struck a variety of poses, two Black women in a Ford Fiesta shouted an approving “Yes, honey!” It wasn’t clear whether they recognized her or just liked her style.
In the van, Petras had been trying to figure out the rest of her day: she needed to pack for the flight back to Los Angeles, where she would be attending a Chanel fashion show, and she needed to finalize the list of thank-yous for her album. She seemed tired, but she perked up when a member of her entourage announced that she had some breaking news: a friend was reporting that “Alone” had made it onto the playlist at her Pilates class. Petras chuckled. “Straight girls are getting into it,” she said. Faint praise, maybe. But maybe also a good sign. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified the Republic executive who congratulated Petras on her Sports Illustrated cover.
