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If you met Cassadee Pope<\/strong> on The Voice<\/em> a decade ago, then you would probably label her as a country singer. But her hardcore fans know she started her career in the pop punk band Hey Monday \u2014 and for her new album, she\u2019s going back to her roots<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pope, 34, quietly returned to the genre a couple of years ago, but her new album, Hereditary<\/em>, finds her diving back into the sounds that she first fell in love with as a teenager. While her country albums always had a rock flair, listeners will find that her new tracks would sound more at home on the Warped Tour than at Stagecoach.<\/p>\n \u201cI never was super down the middle country, it was always a bit more pop-rock country,\u201d Pope exclusively told Us Weekly<\/em> ahead of Hereditary<\/em>\u2019s Friday, July 12, release. \u201cI think my whole career, if you look at it and you really listen to the music and you see the branding and even how I dress or how I used to dress, I never fit into one genre or style.\u201d<\/p>\n Fully embracing Hereditary<\/em> as a rock album, however, allowed Pope \u2014 who won season 3 of The Voice<\/em> in 2012 \u2014 to write more candidly than she had in the past. \u201cThree of Us,\u201d for example, is about the heartbreak of watching someone close to you struggle with addiction.<\/p>\n \u201cHaving loved ones who struggle with substance abuse and addiction, it\u2019s not something that I\u2019ve ever felt like I had the verbiage to talk about,\u201d she explained. \u201cIn country music, I just couldn\u2019t find a way to write about it in a way that made sense in the genre. I\u2019m sure so many people can and have, but for me, it just wasn\u2019t clicking, and so once I was able to strip all the barriers of country music songwriting and what would work and what wouldn\u2019t work, it just opened my mind up to so many different subject matters, and this was one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n