Britney Spears’ ‘In The Zone’ Turns 15

On 2001’s Britney, Britney Spears sang about the struggles of growing up — she wasn’t a girl, not yet a woman. But by 2003’s In the Zone, she had clearly arrived as the latter.

That album was released 15 years ago on November 12th, and marked the singer coming into her own, both as an artist and as a woman; the LP’s erotic content made the single “I’m a Slave 4 U” look relatively chaste. From the moody blue album cover to its chilling production, ‘In The Zone’ was signal a more mature direction for Spears as she explored electronic music and hip-hop like never before. And the lyrics on the record, which referenced her breakup with Justin Timberlake and pushed back at her critics in the media, celebrated new levels of independence for the singer.

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