What a weird time to be Katy Perry. Her music career has been in decline since 2017’s Witness, yet from 2018, she made a reported $25 million (at least) for each of the seven seasons that she judged the once-mighty talent show American Idol. This year, pop fans on social media trashed the string of singles she released in advance of her seventh album, 143. Chart positions suggest the broader listening public is, at minimum, apathetic. And yet, she performed a well-received medley of her greatest hits just weeks ago at the MTV Video Music Awards and turned out a triumphant performance in front of a rapturous sea of people at Rock in Rio the night of 143’s release. The crowd sang along loudly even to the critically reviled single “Woman’s World.” Drifting through the winds of popular culture and probably wanting to start again at least occasionally, it seems reasonable to assume that in 2024, Katy Perry feels like a plastic bag.
It’s dumbfounding that at this critical juncture in her career, 143 is the record she is releasing. Despite reuniting with writer-producer Dr. Luke in an ostensible search for past glory, 143 sounds phoned in. The material here is so devoid of anything distinguishing that it makes one suspicious it’s a troll or cynical attempt for the campy realm of so bad it’s good. No stranger to a thrashing, Perry might as well have transformed into a fish, jumped into a barrel, and told critics, “Shoot me!” Regardless of intent, it’s possible to read this album as a metatext on the disposability of so much pop. 143 is Perry saying, “Nothing matters,” except instead of a “lol” preceding it, it’s a heart-hand emoji.
Rather than wondering what went wrong for Perry, it might be more useful to momentarily ponder what went right. At her peak, she had the kind of imperial phase that only an elite cadre of pop artists get to experience. Perry’s most remarkable stat is that she was the first artist since Michael Jackson to send five songs from the same album to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Her third album (but second as Katy Perry), 2010’s Teenage Dream, cemented her image: colorful enough to appeal to children, zany but not so much that it ever challenged, rangey and resilient in voice, and, perhaps most crucially, a writer of certified tunes.
And that’s kind of…it? While Perry does make implicit sense as a pop singer, describing why she was as big as she was is a challenge. As a key feature, she sometimes cites her own weirdness, as she did in the acceptance speech for her Video Vanguard Award. But Katy Perry is weird like Olive Garden is exotic: not really at all, and everything is suffocated in cheese. You sometimes get the feeling that there’s a disconnect between who Perry actually is and how she comes off, which is a fatal flaw in these branded times. Fourteen years ago, critic Ann Powers, in a Los Angeles Times review of Teenage Dream, referred to Perry’s “essential hollowness” matter of factly, as if it were part of the price of admission.
But Perry could only be essentially hollow for so long—you get about three albums to say precisely nothing as a top-tier artist whose craft isn’t defined by technical virtuosity. The approachable, adorkable, decently voiced Perry could sense as much—it’s why her first Trump-presidency era release, Witness, was touted by her as “purposeful pop.” The world failed to see the purpose.
Well, who needs purpose anyway? Time to pivot again. Perry’s 143 is, by her own estimation, “just a fun record…it’s not that deep.” A product of the California woo-woo ways of a woman who claims to check her horoscope like other people check the weather, 143 is named after Perry’s “angel number.” (“It’s just a little message from the universe that says, ‘I love you, I got you girl. You’re gonna be ok. I want the best for you,” she explained recently.) It’s also vintage pager-speak for “I love you.” On the heels of back-to-back flops, the aforementioned Witness and 2020’s Smile, telling the world “I love you” could read as evolved or desperate, but, as she says, it’s not that deep. 143 is Perry’s first album after the birth of her child, Daisy, and a few of the songs project unconditional maternal love with a vagueness that aspires to universality.
Dr. Luke is here on 10 of 143’s 11 tracks, alongside Perry for the first time since 2013’s Prism. In a 2017 deposition, Perry said that she suspended her collaboration with Dr. Luke on Witness “because working with him at this moment…would not be received well.” Among alleged offenses, Luke had been accused of rape by another close collaborator, Kesha. But Luke’s defamation case against Kesha was settled in 2023, and even before that, his production on post-allegation hits like Doja Cat’s “Say So” and Latto’s “Big Energy” clearly did not deter listeners. In reuniting with Luke, maybe Perry was gambling on faulty public memory or maybe she was just desperate.
Who knows if Dr. Luke would have raised such ire if the album—or at least the lead single and “satirical” female-empowerment anthem, “Woman’s World”—were of “Say So” or “Big Energy” quality. They aren’t. The songs are largely boilerplate pop-trap and EDM that could have come out any time in the past 15 years or so. Perry characterized the album as “a dance-pop record,” then suggested that she could cross making one off her bucket list, as if that wasn’t essentially what she was doing all along. That’s not quite enough of a concept at a time when dance-pop is once again de rigueur, especially when the ensuing material is so frivolous, repetitive, and devoid of joy.
143 is a very confident album, but after one highly scrutinized flop and an entirely ignored one (which is more tragic?), said confidence is misplaced and comes without real swagger. There’s nothing about Perry’s voice that suggests she’s right for an album of straight dance music, even if that's not exactly what 143 is—she’s prone to Broadway-ish belting with the slightest, whitest vibrato and emotionally, there’s a consistent edge to Perry’s voice that often sounds angry or stressed. The causal rage paired well with the guitars that characterized her early hits and gradually evaporated from her sound.
How little Perry has to say is stunning. Four decades of female experience (and six writers) yield generic girl-power sentiment like: “Sexy, confident/So intelligent/She is heaven-sent/So soft, so strong.” Perry sings “Woman’s World” with the deliberateness English speakers use when trying to convey something to someone who doesn’t speak the language. When she does weave evocative imagery, the vibes are off. “Say the right thing, maybe you can be/Crawlin’ on mе like a centipedе,” is supposed to be a come-on in the horny “Gimme Gimme” but yuck, who wants bugs in their bed? “Lifetimes,” whose rolling pianos are supposed to evoke rave but end up sounding like slightly sped up Rhye, pays tribute to her daughter in a string of choruses that all say the same thing: “I’ll love you for life,” “I’m gonna love you till the end,” and “Baby you and me for infinity.” The tension-and-release low end of the track yields not drops but gentle puts. This is kiddie-coaster EDM.
Weird momentary echoes of past songs rattle around 143, like Luke and company are blindly rummaging around a junk drawer of pop music: Kelly Clarkson’s “Catch My Breath,” Duran Duran’s “Come Undone,” Daft Punk’s “Too Long,” Pet Shop Boys “Paninaro” are all consciously or unconsciously referenced briefly. On “I’m His, He’s Mine,” there is a rather pronounced invocation of Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless),” which is both an obvious wagon-hitching to one of the great all-time no-brainer floor fillers, and a squandered opportunity as the slowed-down sample over yet another hip-hop inflected broken beat smothers its dance factor.
The guests here—Kim Petras, Doechii, JID, and 21 Savage—seem at best obliged, at worst blackmailed. Max Martin nabs a co-production credit on the Petras-featuring “Unholy” rip-off “Gorgeous,” and it has not a lick of that special Martin spice. 21 Savage drops some of his worst-ever bars, which is actually a feat given his record, but at least his contribution deprives Perry of being responsible for 143’s worst lines, though barely—in the “E.T.” rip-off about A.I., she sings, “I’m just a prisoner in your prison.”
Like Witness, 143 is a spectacular flop, but it’s a strange one—like one of those restaurants that looks nice and has an expensive menu but serves food so mid as to be insulting. It’s worse than awful. At least awful is something you can direct your rage at, deriving catharsis in the process. Aside from some fleeting hellacious decisions, like the jump scare of a warbling child’s voice that opens the cloying final track “Wonder,” 143 is mostly just…there. The flop cycle is a hard thing to get out of. For one thing, popularity begets popularity. Absent that kind of momentum, a dimmed star needs a once-in-a-career single like “We Belong Together” or “What’s Love Got to Do With It” to shake her from her funk. 143 has no such undeniable classic. So now what? Consider what occurs to one’s sense of self when universal praise dries up—that kind of identity-dissolution is woven into 143’s chintzy fabric. One day you’re ablaze, burning yourself into corneas the world over. Then you’re just a smoky outline of what you once were. And then you’ve disappeared entirely. Just like a firework.
