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Photo: Ruby Boland
Kesha has finally released the official music video for "Backstabber", 16 years after the song came out on her debut album, Animal. The clip premiered on her YouTube channel on October 26. She announced it a day earlier with a short teaser, posted across her social media accounts. "I can't believe I'm saying this but after 16 years, it's finally here," she wrote. She also used that post to invite fans to join her for the premiere and to text her for some special treats.
The video was shot in one all-night session in 2009, with her friends, and rehearsals took place at the house of the choreographer Ryan Heffington. For the last scene she made an outfit out of trash bags. The drag performer Detox, who appears in the clip, wrote that they met 17 years earlier and filmed it in 2009, and Kesha replied, "my queen since day 1".
Kesha shared most of these details in a Q&A with fans on X the night before the premiere. She explained that at the time she was living down the street from a punk house called the Drunk Tank, and that the bridge of her "Tik Tok" video was filmed there as well. She said her look was inspired by her friends. Asked about a time she had been backstabbed, she told the story of a friend who left her at a party, took her car and then offered to come pick her up in it for a fee. A fan also asked whether she had wanted "Backstabber" as her second single. She said she did not remember exactly, but she did remember being obsessed with the song and the video.
"Backstabber" sits on Animal, the chart-topping debut album that made her name. In an NPR interview around its release, she said the song was not angry at all. "It's more about chicks need to watch each other's backs," she explained. "I feel like I treat my friends with so much respect, and they're like family. And when I'm wronged by somebody that is like, part of my family, it's rough. So I had to write a song about it." When she performed the song at Lollapalooza in Chicago in 2024, she swung a knife around onstage and only learned afterward that her missing prop had been replaced with a real butcher knife from the kitchen.
In March she announced the Freedom Tour across North America, with the Canadian electro-funk duo Chromeo among the support acts. Ahead of its first dates she released the single "ORIGAMI!", an electro-pop song and her first new music since . (PERIOD), the album she put out last year on her own label. She released it with its own music video, and in a press statement she called it "a celebration of sex" and a song about "embracing freedom and self-love that we all deserve".
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