Have we, as a society, surpassed the need for Katy Perry?

Her string of hits in the 2010s — inescapable and impressive — was pure party pop, fun for fun’s sake. She was one of the boys. She was a California Gurl spraying whipped cream out of her bra who had a tender side (“Teenage Dream,” “The One That Got Away”). As the years passed, and her subsequent albums (2017’s tryhard Witness and 2020’s depressing Smile) landed with fewer noise, she seemed to be passing the torch to a new generation of pop stars, high on personality, silliness, and camp — Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, etc.

With Katy starting to tease a new look (eerily similar to Charli xcx’s bratty club rat aesthetic) and new music, people were more than dismayed to find that disgraced music producer Dr. Luke was at the helm of her new summer anthem, “WOMAN’S WORLD.” Following an ugly and disappointing legal battle with the singer Kesha, who alleges Luke physically and emotionally abused her during their recording contract — Katy selecting him as a producer for the vast majority of the album is a low blow, an eye roll in the year of 2024 when his backstory is well-known. It was not very ‘girl’s girl’ of her.

This has been dissected ever since “WOMAN’S WORLD” imploded on impact, but Katy singing about feminism on top of a beat made by an alleged abuser is laughable. She could have gotten an array of producers — Dan Nigro, Jack Antonoff, Max Martin — to assist her, but to return with her former hitmaker not only suggests unparalleled desperation, but an ignorance to women’s actual concerns. No one cares that you think women are soft and strong when you’re working with an abuser. Katy sure would like you to cast a blind eye to his involvement — perhaps, even, she or her team thinks you’re too disconnected to even care.

Needless to say, “WOMAN’S WORLD” is terrible. It’s a ridiculous and simplistic stab at female empowerment that missed the Hillary 2016 campaign eight years too late. Once Kamala Harris became the U.S. Democratic nominee for president, they passed “WOMAN’S WORLD” onto her; Harris politely declined. It’s filled with vapid one-liners that would be more fitting as home decor slogans than on a song — she indulges in catty cuts from Twitter like “She’s a sister, she’s a mother,” and saying “Divine feminine” apropos of nothing, as if it means anything. I had no idea that women could be soft and strong before she enlightened us that “She’s a flower, she’s a thorn.” Thank you, Katy!

Slightly below her involvement with Dr. Luke, “WOMAN’S WORLD”’s other fatal flaw is its unashamed pandering to the queer population — once they’re on your side, you’ll only rise (hello, Chappell and Charli). Katy does this in a number of embarrassing ways, the first of which is filling the entirety of 143 with intrepid club bangers that she ostensibly thinks will get gays to call her “mother.” Or even allege that she “served.” ‘If I serve you this house beat, will you forget everything I’ve ever done?’ she seems to ask, but the ‘queer anthems’ she so desperately wants to create are soulless, empty, and fill-in-the-blanks pop: look no further than the personality-voided interpolation of Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” on “I’M HIS, HE’S MINE.” It features Doechii, and another gets Kim Petras, two women who are ostensibly ‘in’ with the queer community, but add nothing. (To keep her straight fans happy, the other two features are 21 Savage and JID, whose fanbases couldn’t be more separate than the two aforementioned women. This truly is an album trying to be for everyone, actually being for no one.) I often think of the moment she asks, “Wig? Did you just say wig?” to a young gay singer on American Idol, attempting to connect with him over stan culture lingo. Fellow judges Lionel Richie and Luke Bryan attempt to ask what that means, but she declines: “It’s not your language, it’s just for us.” But is it?

The aforementioned “I’M HIS, HE’S MINE” is probably the worst offender; starting with the slapstick house beat whose lyrics only degrade after the opener, “I’m his queen, I’m his freak.” It’s a song pleading to land on your Instagram Story (“I’m his boss, I’m that bitch”). Doechii — usually an experimental and interesting rapper — is dulled here, her only highlight a funny pronunciation of “narci-nissistic.” Let’s get it out of the way now and admit “LIFETIMES” is catchy — it’s the least offensive use of a house beat, and though the lyrics are, yes, ridiculous (“I know you feel it / Can you believe it / I’m gonna love you ‘till the end and then repeat it”), it comes out as above-average amongst this crop of duds.

Contrary to that the singles would suggest, 143’s main problem isn’t immediate implosion, but uninspired club minutiae. “GIMME GIMME” is dead on impact, a terrible trap beat infused with sparkles reminiscent of Justin Beiber’s monotonous Changes. Anyone could have made “NIRVANA,” with its nondescript attempts at describing love. And it’s a systematic failure when anyone has to hear Katy Perry say “All my girlies pop up on the regular” on “GORGEOUS”, similarly to the high school-grade writing on “CRUSH.” “Yeah, I, I got these palpitations / Those boom-boom-booms.” At least its intense hyperpop-adjacent backing track, with its clanging and motorcycle revving, offers something new. It’s legitimately difficult to imagine anyone listening to songs like these for fun if they weren’t severely under the influence.

She tries — and fails — to expand her creative imagination on “ARTIFICIAL” (all prior songs, except “WOMAN’S WORLD,” were about romance), taking some stabs at AI without saying much. “Do you put emotions over reason? / Are you gonna love me like a human? / Can you touch me in a simulation?” she asks, which honestly seems artificially generated (a brilliant meta-commentary, if true!) JID attempts to infuse some, I suppose, ‘wise words,’ with his verse: Am I trapped in a maze? Are we lost in the matrix? / Animalistic instinct, it’s all nature / Behind enemy lines of animation / Scribbled upon a page, we’re stuck in a simulation,” all of which amounts to nothing. Katy appears to continue the theme on “TRUTH,” which starts like a dystopian protagonist finding out the secrets of their world. But, of course, this was giving her too much credit — it’s yet another insipid song about the truth of a relationship, not reality. “You’re treating me different, tell me what’s going through your mind?” I thought you were loving this person for lifetimes, so why would we care?

143 ends with a good closer, but it’s too little, too late. “WONDER,” which features the voice of her four year old, asks to not lose the child-like whimsy and imagination we have when we’re younger. “Stay wild, beautiful child / Don’t let the weight of the world be heavy on your wings,” Katy tells her, which is certainly a nice thing to say, but it comes across like an impression of P!nk’s made-for-movie anthems. “ALL THE LOVE,” too, about finding hope after swearing it off, is sort of fun, too, and it has a nice post-chorus (on this album, you take what you can get).

The absurd comedy of errors that started with the rollout of “WOMAN’S WORLD” — Dr. Luke’s involvement, a pleading insistence that it was satire, environmental destruction allegations with the video for “LIFETIMES” — would suggest a more disastrous total package for an album, but 143 is honestly just boring, its runtime with forgettable choruses and filler phrases. All of that, for this? It’s AI slop, bare-minimum pop music for television shows about dating rather than critical consumption. The influence of queer culture results in heartless and embarrassing desperation, asking the question of who this album is even for. Her contemporaries are precise and focused in their images and personas — 143 is simply music for popularity’s sake to hopefully get her back on the charts. “You better celebrate!” she commands on “WOMAN’S WORLD,” forgetting that you shouldn’t have to ask people to applaud your return. Depending on how privy you are to useless catchall feminist phrases, it might be a woman’s world. But it is certainly not Katy Perry’s anymore.

order 143 by Katy Perry HERE