Kim Petras ties her album to trans kids’ choices

Kim Petras says her new album is “a real try” to connect with people, and she grounds the record in her childhood reality: driving with her father in Germany to get hormone therapy, watching a brutalist post office get demolished, and returning every few month

Kim Petras doesn’t describe her latest era like a victory lap. She describes it like an explanation she’s been trying to get right for years.

“You dream about as a kid” is the way she puts it when talking about the fantasy of landing a label and finally doing exactly what you thought your life could become. And then. with a laugh. she moves from big-name collaborations to something more personal: she says the “last Nicki [Minaj] feature” she had was “acceptable at this point. ” and she highlights getting to do a David Guetta collab. calling David Guetta “a GOAT.”.

But when the conversation turns to why this album feels different, the pitch changes. Petras says it didn’t feel pointless the way past attempts sometimes can. “It didn’t really work,” she says—then immediately corrects the idea that it was a failure across the board. “Creatively, fully. And commercially for them too.”.

Still, she insists this record has a purpose that goes beyond the usual pop packaging. “It felt really pointless and not the same as this [album]. which has a purpose to connect with people.” She describes the album as a “real try” to let people know her—adding that it’s rare for her to do that. because she tends to “love hiding behind a concept” and “love escapist pop.”.

The bridges on the new album. she says. offer a “multidimensional view to the full picture [of me].” She’s trying to make clear that the character work isn’t the whole story. “It’s more than me playing this character that’s super horny, or this person who kills people. This is combining all of those into a person.”.

The emotional center of that effort. she says. is “Brutalist.” When asked what thoughts and feelings she carried while writing it. Petras ties the track to an exact memory: “It’s the story of my dad and I driving around in Germany to get my hormone therapy when I was a kid.” She says her father used to show her buildings along the way and teach her about architecture.

There was one structure they fixated on—a “particular brutalist post office” they were obsessed with. “It was something we could bond over.” She describes how the treatment schedule worked: they “came back to the city every few months or so to get psychological assessments of how [the treatment is] going.”.

Because she’s from “a really small town. ” she says the trips meant driving to a big city. and in her case that city was Hamburg in Germany. Then comes the moment that still seems to stick to the story even now. “One day we noticed they knocked [the post office] down and built an apartment building that was a classic modern apartment building.” Her reaction then is the same one she remembers now: “We were like. ‘Ugh. they ruined the city.’”.

The album’s broader argument sits beside that comparison. Petras tells a listener that she understands what it means when something is framed as “ruined” while other people can love what replaced it. “I felt that throughout the entire record. especially on ‘Brutalist. ’” she says. and that feeling becomes a way to talk about how people judge her life.

In “recent years. ” she says. she’s watched public talk harden around her transition—especially when she remembers being “12 talking about it” in the German media. She says she regrets the way privacy blurred. but she also insists she was “really unashamed” because she was a kid and she saw it as simple reality: “This is the way it is.”.

Now that she’s in America, she says the climate feels different, and harsher. “Now that I’m in America. there’s so much shame around sex. sexual education is such a taboo. ” she says. She links it to today’s political pressure around trans youth. saying that “it’s such a weird climate right now especially about trans kids in particular. They’re the enemy right now.”.

In that environment. Petras says she’s “happy” she can stand for the idea that “trans kids can transition and then be a grown up and happy and make [those] choices.” She says she made those choices for a reason that she believes is often ignored. “I made the right choices that I’m proud of to this day.”.

But she also describes the backlash she still hears. “But [at the same time] I have people saying I ruined my body and I ruined my life.” She says those critics “don’t know me at all.” And she points to the part of her story that. to her. seems missing from the loudest judgments: she says she went to “so many psychologists and so many doctors. ” and that her hormone treatment wasn’t something she decided in a vacuum. “It was a real thing that had an assessment and [they gave me] an answer [about] why I got to [get hormone treatment]. It saved my life.”.

Then she confronts the contradiction she keeps encountering: people who use her survival to argue against her. “Then there’s people who are like, ‘This saved your life, but you ruined everything,’” she says.

That tension—between what she says was medically assessed and what others insist was “ruin”—is where she brings the story back to her childhood. to her father. and to that demolished post office. “I felt like my dad and I were guilty [of that with the apartment].” She imagines other people living in the modern building and feeling differently. “There’s people living in this modern apartment building now probably like. ‘We love it here. ’ and we’re like. ‘Nah. it’s basic and y’all ruined it.’”.

For Petras, the comparison is personal, but the takeaway is bigger than one song. “I thought it was interesting to compare the two.” She says she wants people to sit with the question of what “ruined” means when other people don’t share your view: “What does it mean if something’s ruined but other people love it and it’s subjective.”.

And she connects that directly to the way she’s been discussed online and in public life—people accusing her of “fucked it all up”—and to how she’s trying to step away from the pop formula that keeps reducing her to a character. “People are saying that you fucked it all up,” she says. “That relates so much, too, to [how I’m] getting away from the pop formula.”.

Kim Petras Brutalist hormone therapy trans kids David Guetta Nicki Minaj Germany Hamburg brutalist post office psychological assessments pop formula