From 'Teenage Dream' to millennial nightmare – where did it go wrong for Katy Perry?

When Katy Perry released her comeback single in July the reviews were brutal.

"Woman's World" provoked "some of the most savage reviews I can remember in years", said Carl Wilson in Slate. But with her new album, "143", now hitting the shelves, has there been a softening of the critical verdict? Spoiler: there has not.

'Mercifully brief'

"I'm honestly not accustomed to a high-level pop album being this genuinely bad," said Wilson. The "kindest thing I can say" is that "it is mercifully brief". It "makes one question how good she was in the first place" and "how much was just being in the right place at the right time".

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Comparing the material to something created by artificial intelligence, Consequence's Wren Graves said that "even if no AI was involved, it gives you the same queasy feeling in your stomach". The Financial Times called the album "ham-fisted", Business Insider's Callie Ahlgrim said it "doesn't have a single redeeming song" and Variety's Steven J Horowitz said she "sounds disaffected and removed, as if she'd just punched in between 'American Idol' tapings".

There were kinder words, of sorts, from Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker, who wrote that, aside from "Woman's World", the rest of the album "is fine, I guess". Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis said that it’s "certainly some way short of total catastrophe".

'Adult nightmare'

So it's "not an understatement" to say Perry's latest album campaign "has been a disaster", said Roisin O'Connor for The Independent. There has been no "goodwill, or even anticipation", for her first album in four years. But what has gone so wrong?

We've "repeatedly seen how banking on nostalgia – without building upon it to offer something new – is a zero-sum game", said Kofi Mframa for USA Today. Perry's new album is less "Teenage Dream" and more "adult nightmare". Attempts to "reclaim former glory" don't "always bear fruit" and "it's only a matter of time until constantly looking back prevents us from moving forward".

Perhaps Perry has simply had her cultural moment. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her "wide-eyed girly-girl persona went instantly out of date", said Wilson, and she has been "floundering like a left shark ever since". It's possible that 2024's "pop landscape" has "no room for the queen of kitsch", said Jared Richards for ABC News. Grace Sharkey, a gender and cultural studies lecturer at the University of Sydney, told the ABC that Perry's tongue-in-cheek "girl power" aesthetic was "clearly meant to capitalise on our popular investment in feminist politics". "But people are increasingly resistant to what they perceive as the commodification of feminist politics."

The 39-year-old's comeback "may also have been hampered" by "a toxic combination of misogyny and ageism that tends to affect female artists over 35" , said Nick Levine for the BBC. Kylie Minogue's 2023 single "Padam Padam" struggled to get airplay on "youth-orientated" radio stations, despite going viral online and cracking the UK top 10.

But "it would be foolish" to write off Perry, a "grafter who has form when it comes to going back to the drawing board". If she can "dial up her propensity for self-reflection" and "make the necessary adjustments", she "may get her comeback further down the line".