Britney Spears is neither working on a new album or harboring secret intentions to return to the music world. The pop star says so herself.
Spears used a candid Instagram post to declare she will “never return to the music industry” to counter reports that surfaced early Wednesday morning on Page Six about her potentially tapping Charli XCX and writer Julia Michaels for a surprise 10th studio album — what would be her first in nearly a decade.
The report claimed the 42-year-old had not recorded any new material yet, “as the project is only starting to take shape.”
“They keep saying I’m turning to random people to do a new album … I will never return to the music industry,” Spears wrote in the caption to an Instagram post of the Italian Renaissance painting “Salome Bearing the Head of St. John the Baptist.”
Spears, whose hits songs include Toxic, Oops!… I Did It Again, and …Baby One More Time, last released music in July in the form of a collaboration with Black Eyed Peas member Will.i.am, titled Mind Your Business.
She continued in the same vein, “When I write, I write for fun or I write for other people !!! For those of you who have read my book, there’s loads that you don’t know about me … I’ve written over 20 songs for other people the past two years !!!”
Comments that claimed her book, The Woman in Me, was released without her approval were also addressed.
The book was a national bestseller, with over 1.1 million copies sold in its first week across print, pre-sales, e-books and audiobooks, meeting public approval almost from the start, as Breitbart News reported.
“I poured my heart and soul into my memoir, and I am grateful to my fans and readers around the world for their unwavering support,” Spears said in a statement that coincided with the book launch by Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.
In a review for Variety, Stephen Rodrick described Spears’s memoir as a lesson about the way the media destroys young, successful women.
File/Britney Spears arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” on July 22, 2019. Spear’s highly anticipated memoir “The Woman in Me” was released Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
He opined, “Talk show hosts and paps have expressed regret that they turned the Princess of Pop into a hunted animal, and the object of scorn. We talk about how we all have learned our lesson. Don’t bet on it.”
“That’s far from the truth,” Spears wrote at the end of her Instagram post.
“Have you read the news these days ??? I’m so loved and blessed.”