This is Christina Aguilera stripped...again.
The brooding ballad "Twice," released Friday, follows the Kanye West-produced "Accelerate," featuring 2 Chainz and Ty Dolla $ign. Aguilera tweeted she loves the song's "raw vocal quality," and she's especially proud of the "spiritual emotion and tone" it captures and conveys for her.
"Well, you're no angel / I never asked you to be / You're my danger, 'cause that's just what I need / But it still hurts me," the five-time Grammy winner sings. "Well, sometimes I wonder what is the meaning of my life / I found the price of love and lost my mind / I will forgive them all of my wrongs and my rights / I'd do it all again and won't think twice / Won't think twice."
"Twice" is one of "many moods" expressed on Liberation, Aguilera added. The album, out June 15, features collaborations with Demi Lovato, Keida and Shenseea, and Aguilera worked with producers and songwriters such as Mike Dean, Julia Michaels, Anderson .Paak and Tayla Parx.
"I don't know why we hurt ourselves to please someone else's perception of self. I'm sorry to my own reflection, I'm sorry for putting you down. I'm sorry I struggle accepting the beauty that lies in myself," Aguilera says in her album trailer. "I feel in life when you get to a place where you feel so comfortable and so routine then you know you have to stop and start from scratch."
"The inspiration for the album? To me, the purest of reason is to get back to that little girl who just wants to be inspired again by truth and by that sense of passion for music and singing and just feeling free and alive again," says Aguilera, who released her last album, Lotus, in 2012. "I've stepped so far away from that little girl, and if that means going away for a little while and figuring out who you are again and what you need to say, then that's what you need to do."
Aguilera, who will perform with Lovato at the Billboard Music Awards, is going on tour this fall.