Who is Katy Perry? As she reminded people in the initial run-up to her comeback single “Woman’s World,” where she dusted off her six RIAA-bestowed Diamond awards, she’s one of the biggest-selling pop stars of the millennium, with fizzy, playful tracks like “California Gurls” and strident empowerment anthems like “Firework” racking up millions of sales. She’s judged wannabes on American Idol; she’s headlined the Super Bowl halftime show; she’s celebrated a king’s coronation. She’s done it all, backwards and in heels.
Who Katy Perry might be in 2024, though, is another question entirely—and one that she tries to answer on her sixth full-length, 143. Leaving Idol behind, which she did in May, implied that she wants to return to being a full-time pop monarch. But the landscape she’s returning to isn’t one easily swayed by cotton-candy bikinis and winking allusions to cherry Chapstick. Thanks to the waning influence of radio, stardom even at the level of Perry’s doesn’t guarantee singles-chart success, while the maximalist productions that she used to lord over feel as dated as a Vine. Perry seems aware of her unmoored state on 143, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to reclaim the cultural spot that she had in in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s through tricks — cheap if hooky affirmations, broad appeals to the male gaze — that worked back then.
Those tricks include rekindling her relationship with Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, who co-produced “I Kissed A Girl,” the stompily Sapphic hit that began her rise from the Warped Tour to arenas in the late ‘00s, and who was also on the core team that brought cuts like the insistent “Roar,” the electro-trappy “Dark Horse,” and other Perry megahits (including all those Diamond-awarded cuts) to life. Going back to Dr. Luke, who Perry left behind for 2017’s Witness (and in the wake of the producer’s long legal entanglement with Kesha), makes sense in a mercenary way. Perry’s place in pop has been slipping for a while; her Idol tenure coincides with a run where she placed zero singles in the Hot 100’s top ten, and only two in the top 20 (with one being “Feels,” a Calvin Harris-Pharrell-Big Sean collab that beamed Perry’s disembodied voice in from space).
But in practice on 143, that reteaming more often than not comes off as boring, a rote attempt to rekindle those glory years with slightly updated reference points. “Woman’s World,” the robotic quasi-celebration of being female, sets the table for the cliché-filled, see-Spot-run lyrics that dominate, the playfulness of yore steamrolled over by a database of clichéd rhymes. “Gorgeous,” a duet with fellow Gottwald protégé Kim Petras, comes off like a copied-homework homage to the German singer’s collaboration with Sam Smith “Unholy,” swapping in smoky trap beats for that 2022 cut’s midnight-mass gothiness. “I’m His, He’s Mine” plays the 45 of Crystal Waters’ 1991 house-pop hit “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeness)” at 33, giving Perry and the MC/singer Doechii room to drowsily rhapsodize over a love interest whose biggest asset seems to be sticking around. “Nirvana” is a club cut drained of its stakes, Perry wailing loudly, if not lustily, about a psychosexual union with a partner “in the diamond sky” over a thumping instrumental that feels as fresh as conference-call hold music.
143 ends with “Wonder,” a high-gloss banger that recalls the most banal 2010s EDM-fest-pop while telling the next generation to shake off the “weight of the world” and stay “wild” and “pure.” “Can somebody promise me our innocence doesn’t get lost in a cynical world?” Perry asks at one point — a great question to ask in 2024. But coming after the previous 10 tracks’ flop-sweat-flecked effort to crowbar Perry back into the zeitgeist, it sounds utterly hollow — and including her daughter Daisy on the track, which also happens to be the lone offering without any Luke involvement (it was instead produced by the Norwegian pop architects Stargate), feels more like a deflection against critique than a hope that the next generation will find a way to transcend the present’s muckiest parts. To drive home that point, Daisy gets the last word on the album, asking, “someday when we’re wiser/Will our hearts still have that fire?” It’s a pity that Perry doesn’t seem to have asked herself that while putting together this confused attempt to recapture pop listeners’ attention.
