Never really over? Can Katy Perry’s career recover from critical brickbats and PR faux pas?

For a measure of how well things have been going for Katy Perry as she prepares to release her seventh album, a headline in New York Magazine’s the Cut this week said it all: “Finally, Some Good News for Katy Perry” – namely MTV’s announcement that the 39-year-old pop star will receive the lifetime achievement Video Vanguard award at its Video Music Awards on 11 September, and perform a medley of her greatest hits.
Presumably that won’t include either of the advance singles from her new record, 143. Released in July, lead track Woman’s World garnered universal pans, including a one-star review from the Guardian, for what critics perceived as its outdated girlboss-feminist messaging and a video that Perry claimed satirised the male gaze – but seemed to many viewers to directly perpetuate it. It peaked at No 47 in the UK and No 63 in the US – an ignominious outcome for a pop star who once tied Michael Jackson’s record for sending five songs from a single album, 2010’s Teenage Dream, to No 1.
Second single Lifetimes, a Eurodance song about Perry’s love for her infant daughter, is set to hit No 57 in the UK on Friday (it won’t chart in the US until next week). That song was further damned after the Balearic Islands’ ministry of agriculture, fisheries and the natural environment said the production company behind its Formentera-set video was under investigation for failing to seek the necessary permissions. A representative for Perry’s label, Capitol, told Rolling Stone that with one permit still in process they were given verbal authority to proceed, and that they “adhered to all regulations associated with filming in this area and have the utmost respect for this location and the officials tasked with protecting it”.
Regardless of any environmental damage, the damage to Perry’s career was done: the news spread like wildfire, indicating the level of schadenfreude that has befallen the 143 campaign. How did Perry misjudge her comeback so badly? “There was a general feeling that if she went ‘back to her roots’” – namely gaudy pop anthems – “there might be an appetite for that,” said DJ Louie XIV, host of the Pop Pantheon podcast. “As the post-Lorde period of sad-girl pop is winding down, there’s a new generation that is obviously paying homage to her – Chappell Roan has talked about how much she’s inspired by Teenage Dream. I think she took that too literally and went back to her primary collaborator, Dr Luke, and really miscalculated how that was going to be received.”
143 began life with a target on its back in early July, when Perry announced that she had returned to working with Luke. The producer behind her biggest hits experienced major reputational damage from a protracted legal battle with Kesha, who sued for sexual assault in 2014 (her claims were dismissed and Luke’s countersuit for defamation was settled out of court in 2023). Perry didn’t work with the producer on her 2017 album Witness or 2020’s Smile.
Luke has been resurgent in pop again in recent years, working with German pop star Kim Petras and US star Doja Cat. But Doja, said Louie XIV, “has done a pretty good job of insinuating that her collaborations have been forced upon her. Katy had seemingly very cynically stopped working with him, which makes it worse PR for her to go back to him. Do I think Woman’s World would have been a No 1 hit [without his involvement]? No. But I think going back to Luke softens the ground for everyone to dunk on her so hard.”
Part of the problem, said cultural critic Emma Garland, is that Perry appears out of touch. “She’s offering stock Love Island music with an empty political message. It smacks of hollow Hillary Clinton campaign-era ‘pussy hat’ feminism, and I think a lot of young women especially feel repelled or hard done by that. Perry belongs to a cast of individualised pop stars who still believe that music can change the world, whereas the current climate is hungry for a certain kind of tonal abjection, or out-and-out carnality, that comes from a loss of faith in all institutions – including the music industry.”
If Perry is panicking, she isn’t showing it: she and fiance Orlando Bloom spent the week holidaying in Italy with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the second-richest person in the world. But inside her camp there is likely “probably a lot of hurt”, said an independent publicist for significant major-label pop clients, speaking anonymously.
To counter the backlash, they said, “I would zoom right out and think about the legacy of Katy and all the amazing things she stands for and has achieved in her career to date – and own [the response], really make something of it. You can really do that in this era – and find your superfans.” As for Luke, they said, “it would have helped if the song was a banger because pop fans can be forgiving. Maybe [her team] thought Katy was bigger than the controversy.”
Threading the needle of what fans might want from her, said Louie XIV, “would take an artist with more adroitness. Katy Perry is a very blunt instrument. She doesn’t have a ton of nuance in how she approaches her work.” But the MTV Video Vanguard award – recognising her rarely matched career highs – might suggest a path forward. “I think she can salvage the era by attempting to pivot to a greatest hits tour. I DJ all the time for people of all ages, and those old Katy Perry songs go incredibly hard for everyone, still.”
And while pop fans and critics feast on the carcass of an album that appears dead in the (environmentally unsanctioned) water a month ahead of its 20 September release, it’s important to remember that most pop stars don’t remain at the top of the charts for that long, said Louie XIV: Perry’s pop debut, One of the Boys, was released 16 years ago.
“She’s the most down-the-middle version of pop stardom. Six years of hits and a slow and steady decline into nostalgia. If you were going to make a broad movie character about the cliche pop star, it would be Katy Perry.”