Kesha insists she can sing without auto-tune. The "Tik Tok" hitmaker was determined to prove her critics wrong on her second album Warrior and has banished all technological tricks and added more rock guitars in order to show off her vocals.

"I got really sick of people saying that I couldn't sing, because I can do very few things confidently in my life, and one of them is that I can sing. I remember thinking [with Animal], 'Oh, it's just processed. People will learn that I can sing later.' But after reading some reviews that were like, 'She can't sing,' I finally was like, 'F**k that.'"

The controversial starlet - born Kesha Rose Sebert - is back in the charts after taking a short sabbatical at the end of 2011 because she felt she needed time to relax and to embark on a "spiritual journey." However, she admitted she had to ask her record label to "back off" when they started pressuring her to make new music.

"I had the label breathing down my neck to come back and make a new record, and I kind of had to tell everybody to f**k off for a month. I needed to get my head back on straight and sleep in the dirt for a little while. And then I came back and have literally been working on my record ever since," she said.

Warrior is to be released on December 4.