Rainbow | Kesha

Portraying herself as the careless firecracker who was the first to the party and the last to leave, Kesha was the essential guest to every dance floor across the nation in her early days. It was hard to run across a contemporary hit radio station at the beginning of this decade that didn't have "TiK ToK" or "Blow" on heavy rotation, because Kesha had entered the mainstream at just the right time. The youth of the United States had become enamored with the recklessness of Jersey Shore, and Lady Gaga had brought back four-to-the-floor, dance-oriented pop. And as a girl who painted her life as a never-ending cycle of drinking, sleeping in cars and bathtubs, and searching for new guys to do the two previous things with her, Kesha was nothing short of fun and nothing less than unrealistically outlandish.

Her second record, Warrior, doubled down in punchy electronics and pitch-corrected sing-rapping, but by the time it was released, Kesha had bent her angle to market a message of self-acceptance to proud, young social anomalies. A documentary-style reality show and coinciding autobiography, My Crazy Beautiful Life, paralleled Kesha in everyday life to her fans, validating her self-proclaimed outcast status. Just as rambunctious as she seemed in her craft, she fantasized out loud about fondling a Scottish man under his kilt and drank her own urine. Though the recipient of more than a few side-eyes, she was a beacon of confidence in herself and her craft.

With her name emblazoned with a dollar symbol and her online presence marked with the username "keshasuxx," she even seemed to hold a sense of humor about her own public persona, which she admitted had been magnified on her own volition. But when she entered rehab for an eating disorder in 2014 and reemerged with the use of her birth name and a fresh start on social media sites as "KeshaRose," it seemed as if the party were over. And when she further revealed physical and sexual assault allegations against Lukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald, the man who has her career gridlocked in a multi-record contract and with whom she made her first two albums, it was hard to fathom how the party was kept alive or even started at all.

Although a liberating album meant to give Kesha a voice all her own for the first time in her career, her third album, Rainbow, is difficult to divorce for its inspiration. She dances around specifics and settles on malleable, generalized statements of freedom and forgiveness – the phrase "learn to let go" comes up a few times on the record. Even lead single "Praying," with an opening dialogue that begs for death and lyrics that aim and fire at Gottwald, throws the past few years' events up to fate and wishes him luck in righting his wrongs: "I hope you're somewhere praying, praying. I hope your soul is changing, changing. I hope you find your peace. Fall upon your knees, praying."

The former cornerstones of her craft – the digitized sing-rapping, the thudding 808s, the party hard mentality – have been largely abandoned in favor of a grittier selection. Riding the wake Lady Gaga stirred with last year's Joanne, Kesha infuses honky-tonk country and back roads rock into an catchy pop base. Her creation yields a borderline-chintzy environment in which she can collaborate with the funk group Dap-Horn Kings on "Woman," a banging, brass-led feminist track, and with Dolly Parton on a cover of "Old Flames (Can't Hold a Flame To You)," a song Kesha's mother wrote in the 1970s and Parton recorded in 1980. In the unexpected collaboration, Parton is all but a paper-thin echo by the time this rendition climaxes with Kesha's strong, stern wails and pounds of drums and tambourines.

Kesha's vocal performances throughout are unprecedentedly organic, without digital alterations to drown them in a syrupy coating, and her radiating presence is undeniable. But her differing goals, both to share her case against Gottwald and to promise that she's still the same fun-loving Kesha, split this record in two. After all, it opens with a middle-finger to bastards, assholes, mean girls, and scumbags and follows a disjointed trajectory that allows it to end on back-to-back tracks about Godzilla stealing French fries at the mall and a metaphoric intergalactic abduction. The latter cuts, of course, take us back to days of Kesha past, favoring the silliness that bolstered her popularity in an era of overdone music videos and red carpet outfits.

Fanned across the record are spaghetti western earworms ("Hunt You Down," "Boots"), electric rock bangers ("Let 'Em Talk"), standard pop cuts ("Hymn," "Learn to Let Go"), and everything in between. But Rainbow, lacking a consistent sonic direction, is nothing if not an embodiment of its title: a spread of many colors. The struggle between comfortable normalcy and conscious personal evolution makes itself clear, as she juggles between the urges to return to fun and games ("Boogie Feet," "Boots," "Hunt You Down") and to reveals details of a story that only tabloids have controlled until this point ("Praying," "Learn to Let Go"). In short, as the therapeutic product of an emotional hurricane, it plays as such – just as it should.

Despite not being in the eye of it any longer, Kesha's storm isn't over yet. She may have been able to release this album without direct contact or a working relationship with Gottwald, but she still is bound to him legally – in fact, these tracks appear to have been published through one of his companies. This isn't to say, however, that Kesha unleashed her Rainbow prematurely. In sharing her narrative and pursuing once prohibited musical avenues, she developed things that many victims cannot: empathy and a renewed sense of self-worth. Rain may continue to fall until the loose ends are tied in the courts system, but until then, Rainbow brings a promise that Kesha will weather the storm and her colors won't be washed away.

Rainbow is available now under Kemosabe Records and RCA Records.