The arduous summer rollout of Katy Perry’s seventh studio album was a rare gaffe-only product launch. While 143’s lead single, “Woman’s World,” signaled an aggressive pivot to the disco of Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul” and Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Perry’s play at a comeback journey was derailed. The lyrical simplicity on display felt better suited for daytime pharmaceutical ads. The music video’s absurdist gestures so confused its feminist intent that Perry later claimed it was satire. The presence of hitmaker Łukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, whose nearly decadelong legal war with Kesha over sexual-assault allegations was finally settled out of court last year, further undermined the message of women’s empowerment. Neglecting to sufficiently address the thorn in her charm campaign, the singer instead spoke of triumph over emotional adversity and an itch to have fun again: “If you don’t find a way to sow seeds in the valleys,” she recently told Zane Lowe, “you never find those fruits in the peaks.” 2020’s Smile was her exploration of those lows, but 143, which revels in joy without urgency, is stilted by its own one-note message.
Yet to anoint it a contender for the pop flameout of the year and move on ignores the nagging trends that merged to form this Infinity Gauntlet of missteps. Two years since Renaissance — and ten since Taylor Swift’s bubbly, electronic juggernaut 1989 — neat, unobstructive synth-pop feels perfunctory. Everybody’s doing it because everybody’s doing it. The Weeknd single “Dancing in the Flames” is huffing the glory of “Blinding Lights”; the workmanlike 1989-core on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was outshined by the deluxe-edition’s folk musings. Just as you can tell a film landed within a few years of The Matrix from a thirst to recapture the juice of that Propellerheads “Spybreak!” sequence, this decade (where even Paris Hilton is reworking old house anthems) may well be marked by a torrent of very popular but noncommittal dance music.
Following the path of classic forays into the revitalizing release of disco begs you to bring your best. But albums like 143 linger too long in the footsteps of better hooks. Perry’s downplaying reservations about Luke in favor of reheated Ghost in the Shell and all-ages rave aesthetics feels par for the course in the year of the Beyoncé corpo-lingo email interview, the Ariana Grande divorce-album rollout that didn’t really cover divorce, and the Camila Cabello album that featured Playboi Carti after his domestic-violence charges and kept quiet about sampling The-Dream the same month he was accused of sex trafficking (both artists have denied the charges). It’s no coincidence that this is also the year of the gutted music press.
It takes a village to craft and tackily market a misguided sorta return to form slash capitalist copycat bonanza. There is a whiff of an unspoken playbook in 143’s mistakes, a struggle to square fan service to Perry’s third album, Teenage Dream, with current pop-star conventions. While laughing at the questionable choices made to bring Perry’s latest into the world, don’t forget that executives at Capitol Records — the label also putting out Ice Spice, Troye Sivan, Sam Smith, and Yeat LPs — who are presumably interested in chart placements, thought this campaign suitable for a legacy signee who once logged three diamond singles in one album cycle. We’ll be huddled around a fresh shitshow in another six months if we pretend the buck always stops at one person.
The same year Jennifer Lopez revisited bygone heartbreak and her aughts-era R&B/pop roots on the beleaguered comeback This Is Me … Now, 143 sees Katy Perry reunite with not just Luke but Canadian producer Cirkut and Norwegian duo Stargate, who comprised much of the production braintrust responsible for 2010’s Teenage Dream and 2013’s Prism. The new album juggles hulking trap beats and peppy dance-pop workouts, oscillating between the rap and EDM simulacra of “Dark Horse.” While this balance showcases Perry’s history of working through genres that more artists are increasingly straining to navigate in the long wake of Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Perry’s attempt at imbuing a studio album with the energy of a DJ mix struggles to match the high points in her own catalogue. Her voice hasn’t lost any luster; it’s still a rich instrument whose high notes feel hard earned whenever the material is challenging. It’s just a shame the new album too often trains it on the kind of song that hugs a compelling Selling Sunset drone shot.
The building blocks are present but the compositions lack the old edge, the harsh attack. 143 has gotten the memo that people perk up at the signifiers of ’90s and ’00s dance music — this year, Camila’s C,XOXO sampled Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service,” Justin Timberlake and Cirkut put a French touch jam on Everything I Thought It Was, Ariana Grande dutifully spritzed house and disco singles into eternal sunshine, and Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism bet the farm on mid-tempo post-disco — but missed the lesson that Renaissance’s “Cozy” communicated: songs about relaxation can smack. The production here is unrepentantly smooth, but this isn’t the rubbery softness that makes PinkPantheress tracks turn the ear. “Lifetimes” and “I’m His, He’s Mine” struggle to convey a passing awareness of the recent success of a pulsating four-on-the-floor beat and a rap song heavily sampling an old hit. Perry’s labelmate Doechii is a ray of hope in a song otherwise leaning into the pop star’s stiff hip-hop affectations and a heaping slice of Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” “Lifetimes” spends most of its three minutes buzzing back over a soaring chorus after a short verse, but nothing in the mix is jarring enough to set it apart from the thousand other spikier versions of this kind of thing. This is music that aims for the club but … it’s the rewards club.
143 doesn’t seem anxious to get its hands dirty, with Perry farming out its raunchier lines to other voices. She brandishes their edginess like in the heavily meme’d Saturday Night Live performance of “Bon Appétit,” from 2017’s Witness, where she couldn’t decide what to do with her arms around the Migos. A spitfire verse from Atlanta’s J.I.D on “Artificial” is crowded by songwriting you could get a chatbot to spit out (“Are you gonna love me like a human? / Can you touch me in a simulation?”). Kim Petras shines by delivering the salacious lines Perry avoids on the booming “Unholy”-like “Gorgeous,” but it’s a wild bit of ouroboros: Petras started working with Dr. Luke while Perry was connecting with a string of Swedish pop veterans, probably to avoid the radioactivity of her main collaborator during ongoing Kesha litigation. Even with three Slutpop alums present — Luke, Ryan OG, and Rocco Did It Again! — 143 is sonically and thematically conflict-averse; it makes “Whale Cock” sound visionary. Stargate and Cirkut threaten to get noisy on album closer “Wonder,” but the singer defuses the tension by delivering the sentimentality of a deep-fried motivational Instagram repost.
It goes to show how no amount of marquee names and notable track records can float an idea full of holes. When 143 drops the wellness-guru shtick and speaks to real stakes — such as outlining the journey from adrift to finding fulfillment in motherhood — the nondescript gloss starts to feel intentional. Production sticks to well-trod musical pathways, while the album avoids digging too deeply into uncomfortable subject matter. It’s fitting for a banner season in pop-star evasiveness. Everybody wants to blast some cute shit out and get onto another business engagement after the tumult at the beginning of the decade — like Justin Timberlake, who really didn’t want to ruin his tour; or Grande, who dropped by to feed fans before Wicked; or Perry herself, who released Smile in the terror of August 2020. But that approach has unfortunately yielded too many attempts to bottle the lightning of a past endeavor. 143, a calculated sequence of plays that worked for other pop stars, is guiltiest right now. It floats the posi-vibes everyone serves to Zane Lowe. It explores the same tempos and genres as everyone from Billie Eilish to Lil Yachty. It shows the same deference to collaborators with concerning pasts as too many artists in 2024. (People have overlooked combinations of these faults; 143 stacks an entire deck with them.) Club music without the grit or danger, divorced from a sense of gravity, reminds you why people grew to resent the EDM crossovers of the 2010s. Do we really want to relive that crash?
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the month Perry released her album Smile.