The video for Katy Perry’s recent single Woman’s World concluded with the artist being hoisted aloft, clinging to a helicopter’s door frame with one hand, brandishing a ring light in the shape of the medical pictogram for “female” and bellowing “I’M KATY PERRY!” It was clearly intended as the grand denouement of a big comeback, four years after her last album, Smile: a long time in an era when pop artists seem to constantly provide new material to streaming services. All the stops had been pulled out to ensure a massive hit – a chorus evidently designed to be sung en masse at karaoke by makeshift distaff choirs (and perhaps, as one reviewer suggested, to be lip-synced to on RuPaul’s Drag Race) and a video that attempted to both tick some culturally relevant topics and provoke a TikTok dance craze, its steps briefly shown towards the end.
But things really didn’t work out as intended: Woman’s World was very coolly received indeed. There was a great deal of chatter online about the advisability of releasing a song, ostensibly about female empowerment, co-written and produced by Dr Luke – a man previously accused of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by his ex-collaborator Kesha, although he countersued her for defamation and they settled out of court – accompanied by a video, also ostensibly about female empowerment, that spent a remarkable amount of time offering up lingering shots of ladies’ buttocks and cleavages, the artist’s included. Perry defended the latter as satire rather than a cartoonish attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, but that seemed to butter few parsnips. Having clearly landed wrong, Woman’s World limped into the lower reaches of the charts, then keeled over entirely.
Its follow-up, Lifetimes, arrived with a video that provoked an investigation from the government of the Balearic Islands’ environment department into whether its making caused damage to the heavily protected sand dunes of S’Espalmador – and failed to make the US charts at all.
Commercially disastrous singles, online furore, being branded pop’s leading menace to the sand dunes of S’Espalmador, all in the space of a month. Were you Katy Perry, you might well consider just packing your comeback in, cancelling your forthcoming album and going home to quietly enjoy the fruits of the 100m-plus records you’ve already sold. After all, while it’s not guaranteed that a pop album preceded by two flop singles is a turkey, it’s 99% certain. But, it seems that, if it comes down to gamely selling people a turkey, Perry is up for it like Bernard Matthews: 143 has arrived on schedule.
The promotional campaign around it has gone so wildly off-piste that it feels faintly surprising to report that 143 isn’t that bad. It isn’t that good either, but it’s certainly some way short of total catastrophe. There are moments where it appears to be aiming for the sort of retro dancefloor focus that powered Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, not least when Lifetimes bursts open with a piano riff that vaguely recalls FPI Project’s Italo house classic Rich in Paradise, although it’s worth pointing out that the references are rather less artfully done here: I’m His, He’s Mine has the hook from Crystal Waters’ Gypsy Woman plonked into it, and what Crush really seems to want to evoke is the oompah Euro-house of O-Zone’s Dragostea Din Tei, a sound it’s hard to imagine anyone was clamouring wildly for a revival of. There’s a lot of passable songs based around a pop take on the filtering effects and compressed kick drums of French touch. Closing track Wonder is the best thing here, melodically – it’s got a really strong chorus – and it probably deserves a better setting than the dated EDM anthemics dished up by producers Stargate and Cirkut.
Elsewhere, 21 Savage and Kim Petras’s guest spots are welded to pretty wan bits of trap-influenced pop, but if releasing album tracks that dabble in wan trap-influenced pop was a crime, the list of future court hearings would look like the bill of Radio 1’s Big Weekend or the Capital Jingle Bell Ball. And stripped of its video, Woman’s World is perfectly serviceable as a bit of glossily depthless synth pop: had the decision not been taken during its making to press the button marked “add half-hearted lunge for social relevance” – or had Perry released it a few years back, when, frankly, you couldn’t move for pop singles making half-hearted lunges for social relevance with complete impunity – it might even have been a hit.
And that’s 143’s big problem. It feels slightly out of time, a common-or-garden mediocre pop album with the misfortune to be scheduled in the wake of Charli xcx’s Brat, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet, a trio of messily inventive and hugely successful albums that collectively suggest a certain raising of the pop bar has taken place. What would once have sufficed, at least commercially, now won’t: that its author and her team didn’t notice seems far more intrinsic to 143’s downfall than questionable choices of collaborator, misfiring videos or indeed damage to the sand dunes of S’Espalmador.
