I had a change of heart. Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of the new Katy Perry album, 143.

Yep, here we have the newest full-length LP from pop singer, songwriter, hitmaker, Miss Katy Perry, whose new record here is proving to be one of the biggest pop conundrums of the year. Because if you have been following music trends at all throughout 2024, you know that pop music is truly back on top from the mainstream where Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan, as well as Sabrina Carpenter, have been sopping up a lot of the limelight.

And we've even seen this upward trend on the more alternative side of things, too, with very well-received and beloved records from the likes of Magdalena Bay, Clairo, Remi Wolf, and of course, Charlie XCX, who's new Brat record has really proven to be the summer pop zeitgeist.

At the moment, there is just an intense demand for pop bops, and much of that demand is actually being met with substantive records that actually bring some really good songs and esthetics to the table.

Not every significant pop release this year has been a major success, though.

I think this intense hunger has put listeners in one of two camps, one where maybe they're being more forgiving toward albums that aren't quite meeting expectations or being incredibly vicious in the face of these album releases. I'm reminded of recent albums from Camila Cabello or Dua Lipa or even Taylor Swift, whose creativity or lack thereof on The Tortured Poets Department and astronomical commercial success could not be more mismatched right now.

Either way, it's a very interesting time to be following all of this because the pop audience is really at a peak where they are so enthusiastic and yet also so cutthroat. Enter Katy Perry, who has been out of the limelight for a minute. The amount of time she spent in the shadows feels even longer than the four years it's been since her last full-length LP, Smile, because that very short, very disappointing album proved to have little to no lasting power. I mean, I reviewed the thing, and yet I can't remember a single note from it, which makes her 2017 album, Witness, feel like her last actual release.

As Katy Perry's career moves forward, though, that record is proving to be the beginning of the end for her, as it, too, also had very little commercial staying power and was artistically very much a step down from the incredible, incredible commercial run that Katy was on from the late 2000s to the mid-2010s. A time period where it felt like she just couldn't really be stopped. A time when her success actually dwarfed that of Taylor Swift, which is crazy to think now.

But if Katy Perry was going to mount some comeback, 2024 would be the year to do it. Like I said, pop music is just really in demand at the moment. At this point, who wouldn't want more bangers on the level of "California Girls" or "Dark Horse" or "Roar" or "Teenage Dream"? I mean, the sounds and aesthetics of those tracks might not exactly be the pop meta at this very moment, but I don't think we'd have those songs in the first place if Katy didn't have the capacity to put her finger to the wind and see what direction things were moving in.

You also hope that Katy is surrounding herself with people who can do that, too. But apparently, we're foregoing that entirely on 143, a record that is just as short, uninspired, and disappointing as Smile. But on top of that, it feels like on this album, Katy and her team just have lost the pop plot or just voluntarily buried their heads in the sand when writing and recording this project.

I mean, the promo cycle for this record alone is just the textbook definition of putting your worst foot forward. As many fans had an understandably negative reaction to the announcement that she would be working with Dr. Luke on this album. Then there was all the promotional art which many fans pointed out is derivative of artists like Arca. Then from there, we had the first single from this album, "Woman's World", which is this pumping electro and dance pop number, over which Katy Perry offers nothing but generic, overly processed lead vocals, and white feminists pandering about how women are so soft and so strong, and she's a flower, she's a thorn. I mean, it's a new song, but it somehow brings back nightmares of the music that they played at the 2016 DNC.

I mean, the track reads almost as parody, especially with Katy's ending comments saying, "It's a woman's world." And what's even more ironic about this is that the following track opens up with a guest verse from 21 Savage. Mister, I know you on your period, baby. Can you suck it himself. Because nothing says, "Women rock!", like making them feel weird and undeserving of sexual reciprocation because it's that time of the month.

Not that the song itself is salvageable outside of the 21 feature because instrumentally, it's really just a generic pop trap fusion piece that feels like it went out of style several years ago at this point. And not only do I get secondhand embarrassment from the painfully basic production, but also some of the lyrics, too. "Gimme gimme / Baby stop wasting my time / Kitty Kitty, Kitty / Want to come party tonight? / Trippy Trippy Daddy / Take me on a ride."

However, I'm getting ahead of myself going into the deeper cuts of this record because there are other singles which, while not as bad as "Woman's World", are terrible in their own way. There's "Lifetimes", which lyrically did turn the pandering down, and overall this track is more in line thematically with the album's greater messaging around a blissful never-ending love.

But still, stylistically and aesthetically, all this song really offers is the same painfully uninspired dance pop that was already stale and old hat by the time Katy started dropping her biggest, most breakout hits. I mean, I know these Y2K style anthems and vibes are making a bit of a comeback right now. Katy and her team seem to have at least picked up on that much.

But the artists out there today who have been riding this wave the most successfully typically do something weird or slightly subversive with it. They're not just dropping a 1998 Cher "Believe" b-side, which is what this track sounds like.

Then the final big single that dropped before this album came out was "I'm His, He's Mine" with Doechii, which I was excited for because Doechii is objectively on a very interesting run right now. But unfortunately, this song could not have been more of a let down because it's pretty much just one more example of the worst trend going on in pop music right now: delivering much crappier rehashes of songs that dropped 20 to 30 years ago. And in this case, it is the house classic "Gypsy Woman" from Crystal Waters; which, actually, bringing this song back with Doechi right now in 2024 could make sense in the abstract, as like hip house is most definitely having a bit of a comeback. Club-centric rap bangers are very popular right now, too. Those are on the come up. But instead, what we get is another pop trap hybrid remix thing, which, again, just comes across as tired and stale at this point, really something that could have even landed on Katy Perry's 2017 Witness record.

Deeper into the album, we have more stale Y2K pop with "Crush". There's also "Gorgeous" with Kim Petras, which feels like something that we already got, but better during Charlie XCX's Vroom Vroom era.

And then the weak first half of the album transitions into a very weak second half, too. There's "All the Love" which is just as behind the curve aesthetically as everything else here. But what's funny about this track is that there are so many songs on this album where Katy Perry is just writing about this incredible, intense, amazing love that she's experiencing. A love so great, it's really selling her on the idea of love. She was once a love skeptic, but now she's a believer. Love is real. Love is powerful.

Which makes me wonder, what could she be seeing or experiencing in her real life on this front that would cause her to write about it in this way? Because the lyrics in reference to all of the love that is being spoken about on this album are so surface level and plain and generic that it doesn't really feel like the result of one person's singular personal experience with it. Like all the words on this album seem more as if they were written by a focus group of people you were spitballing with in a writer's room.

Like, okay, we got to write a song about love. What does love feel like? Oh, it's like floating on air? Oh, and love is also like being set free and colors.

Give me a goddamn break.

The production on the record does improve a bit on the very smoky, moody house vibes of "Nirvana", but the lyrics really aren't any better with Katy singing about offering someone a ride on her rainbow.

Then from here, rapper Jid actually surprises on the song "Artificial", where he really goes in on a speedy and thematic verse in reference to the song's themes of just skepticism around technology and artificial intelligence and how it may impact interpersonal relationships. But this skepticism around tech and simulations and the like, is this something Katy Perry actually deeply feels? Or does it just sound like something popular to say right now? Because this is the same person who notably posed with a cyber truck that Elon Musk gave her, as I guess she really secured a seat on that ship to Mars once the tech bro apocalypse hits all of us. But yeah, this song overall just feels like a very vapid surface-level attempt at social commentary that goes nowhere fast.

In the final moments of the album, the song "Truth" is throwing all of those love themes into the wood chipper as this song is all very much about cheating and deception, with some very weird lines about Katy Perry just going off of intuition here and wanting access to this person's phone password, which, I don't know. Relationships can go cold for a lot of reasons. Maybe he's not that into you. It's hard to tell because rather than fill in these narrative gaps and give an actual story, Katy Perry would rather go off of vague notions and lyrical clichés that don't really tell us much of anything at the end of the day.

So maybe the love being sung about on this album goes south from there. I'm not really sure because Katy dumps even that narrative for the closing track, "Wonder", where it feels like she's trying to rekindle a sound and a vibe from much earlier in her career. We're getting this glittery, positive, soaring anthem that feels like a motivational poster. Think "Firework", tracks like that. The ultimate message of this song is: don't let this dark, terrible, cynical world turn you sour and keep you from wondering and hoping.

In a way, I suppose it's really fitting that this album ends in a very similar place to where it started with a track that feels like a super tacky PSA, like a musical opiate a tyrannical government would develop in a Ministry of Entertainment in order to keep the masses from looking at the sorry state of things with sober eyes.

Yeah, that's how this song feels and how this album feels as a whole, because as love sick as all of it is, lyrically and aesthetically, it truly speaks to nothing, and is just an utter disappointment, despite my hopes going into it not being very high, which is why I'm feeling a decent to strong two on this thing.

Anthony Fantano. Music. Katy Perry. Forever.