We listened to Katy Perry’s new album, but you don’t have to

Not even the sexy cover picture to Katy Perry’s new album 143 can save what might be the worst piece of music released this year. It’s a collection of music, all right, but the vitality of Perry’s debut has long since been lost in a drone of repetitive, uninspiring bubble gum.

What happened? Because a new drop by the I Kissed a Girl star should have been an anticipated event that delivered. Instead, it’s challenging to tell one track apart from another and the whole album almost feels as if ChatGPT had something to do with its origins. It’s as creative as walking up to a girl in a pub and spewing the one-liner: “Your father must have been a thief because he stole the stars and placed them in your eyes”.

Perry’s star fades on this album. And I am not sure if there is any way to come back from this one. 

Perry’s star fades on 143

It’s curious that the first single Woman’s World, with a sexy video to pair, took seven people to write. Perry was one of them, and apart from one other female voice, the other authors of the track were all… wait for it… men. It’s a clubby ditty that revisits feminist themes of world domination and how women are the future etcetera.

This is something that Beyonce shared with us previously in the equally dull Girls Rule The World. Perry is about ten years too late with the tune, the video, well, stuck in the nineties with mechanical horses and a literal, though Perry said a satirical, interpretation of a lyric that has been. 

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Selling fierce, when the world has moved on, misses the beat entirely. In the past decade and a half, the ‘free the nipple’ movement has taken girl power to another level entirely along with Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, and even the Kardashians; in this universe, nobody must state the obvious. Assuming your power as a woman does not need to be stated upfront anymore. It has just become and just is.  Perry somehow missed this boat.

The balance of the album also doesn’t quite get there. It feels as if Katy is skating on thin ice between repetitive pop beats and quickly assembled lyrics that start feeling like wannabe Lady Gagas and Gloria Gaynor reprises now and then, just without the following in drag and outlandish clobber. Perry targets all sorts with this record, but it’s all end-of-the-month Salticrax. 

Repetitive pop beats

On Crush, Perry sings about whether it is or isn’t, because it makes her blush whenever they touch. It’s words, prose on top of a beat and it all feels packaged and over-produced but somehow, heard it all before. Another track, Nirvana, sounds like a Madonna album reject during Mads’s electronic phase. Artificial, a later track, starts in the same way as Nirvana, but it ends with me turning it off. 

In totality, the album feels like a single, too-long track. Yet it’s not a montage of thought or expression. Instead, it’s a dance clubby misfit. 143 is an absolute disappointment for the artist and her creative partner Dr Luke. This pair gave the world hits like Teenage Dream and I Kissed a Girl. It was pop, but evergreen. 

Of course, Dr Luke has his own set of problems with the ongoing legal battle and accusations of sexual harassment from popstar Kesha. But that’s another story for another day… or was it just an insecure knee-jerk because Perry wanted a hit?  While it was a controversial decision to re-partner with him, it didn’t make much of a difference to the drabness of the album.

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