Review: Katy Perry’s new album commits the ultimate pop sin – it’s boring

Katy Perry’s comeback album 143 arrives today amid an avalanche of bad press. Somehow, it’s even worse than expected.

With her seventh studio album 143, out today, Katy Perry recently told fans she “set out to create a bold, exuberant, celebratory dance-pop album.”

What happened?

Perry’s been hit with a slew of bad press lately, ever since 143’s debut single dropped with a resounding thud back in July.

Woman’s World opens the album, the first of three tracks represent the worst opening salvo of any Katy Perry album to date, and perhaps the weakest start to any major pop release this year.

The song still sounds just as much like a 1987 Tampax ad jingle as it did upon release …

Proof that Katy Perry's abysmal comeback would work better if it was 1987 and she was the face of a Tampax campaign pic.twitter.com/v5mLEMTfh2

— Daniel (@danielgilbert) July 13, 2024

… but somehow, it gets worse from there. Gimme Gimme and Gorgeous follow, collaborations with 21 Savage and Kim Petras, respectively. Both sound like ill-advised attempt to recreate the trap-pop of Dark Horse, 11 years later: Sparse, listless songs in which Perry and guests sound decidedly bored.

Wasn’t this meant to be a dance pop album? Where’s the fun?

Katy Perry's new album is out today.

It’s not until track four, current single I’m His, He’s Mine, that the pace starts to raise a little. That’s thanks to two things: A winning guest appearance from charismatic rapper Doechii, and the fact that the song uses as its bedrock Crystal Waters’ 1991 house classic Gypsy Woman.

Turns out, recent single Lifetimes – mocked by some as sounding like the sort of cheap dance song played when Love Island contestants enter the villa – is perhaps the best thing here. It’s got a pulse, a catchy chorus, and a sense of genuine dance floor euphoria.

But after that brief highlight, the back half of the album is a slog of anodyne tunes that make 143 feel much longer than its 34 minutes.

Perry promised a euphoric dance album – so where is it? Picture: Catherine Powell/Getty Images for MTV

There’s the overblown Nirvana, which many have already pointed out sounds exactly like Double Trouble, the main song from Will Ferrell’s 2020 Netflix Eurovision parody film (it’s one thing to channel Eurovision – Dua Lipa did it to great effect on her new album with Falling Forever – but to rip off a Eurovision parody song?).

Artificial returns – yet again! – to the trap-pop production style heard earlier in the album, which will leave you wondering exactly why Dark Horse was the blueprint for so much of the music here when it’s arguably one of her hits that’s aged the worst.

Perry at least sticks the landing: Closing track Wonder can be filed alongside Lifetimes as a glimpse of the album we thought we were getting, an uplifting dance banger dedicated to her daughter Daisy that sends the listener out on a high. But it feels like too little, too late.

”I wanna know the truth, even if it hurt, hurts me,” Perry sings, over and over again, on the album’s dreary penultimate track, Truth. 

The truth – and it may hurt – is that there’s nothing here that could help salvage 143, an album that feels dead on arrival.

Originally published as Review: Katy Perry’s new album commits the ultimate pop sin – it’s boring