SOUND OF NOW

Thanks to our three cover stars-Kim Petras, Victoria Monét, and Kali Uchis-the future of music looks like something entirely new. More original, more exciting, more f*ck-yesput-this-on-my-playlistright-now. Which is exactly what each of them has been manifesting all along.

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Petras has a PhD in pop star. And like most advanced degrees, it came with work, years of ideating and innovating her sound, her performances, and her persona. Well, personas-plural-because there have been eight (8!) since the 31-year-old started all this at age 19. And now, after a year that included a Grammy win and 24.5 million monthly Spotify listeners, the dance-pop phenom-famous for her up-tempo tracks and tongue-in-cheek lyrics-seems to be evolving again.

I'm currently looking at who I'll call Downtime Kim, curled up on a brown couch in her Los Angeles home. Sweats casual and eyebrows immaculate, she's talking with her hands, complimenting my mascara, and reminiscing on how she got here, how she earned this next role.

"I'm always looking to free myself of things," she says. "I think that's where the alter egos came from. You can tell a lot about me by looking at the characters I made up." The first, L.A. Kim, was maybe the hardest to fully realize. She was like a modified version of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz if Dorothy were a German immigrant who was weaned on '90s Britney, moved to the U.S. as a teenager, and began spitting out EDM music. Kim's version of Kansas-Uckerath, Germany, a rural village awash in greenery-was nothing like she wished it were, so she would spend hours imagining otherwise.