Katy Perry’s 143 is a disaster: But haven’t her albums always been bad?

Katy Perry dropped 143 on Friday, and the dropping of said album landed on this earth like a sack of sh*t. If that sounds harsh, it’s nothing compared to the critical reception 143 has debuted to. As per Metacritic of the time of writing, it is the worst reviewed album of 2024, the worst reviewed album since 2011 and the worst reviewed album by a female artist noted on the site of all time. I can’t really stress how catastrophically disastrous this is, for anyone’s career – not least for a once legendary pop star who holds the accolade of five number one singles from a single album. A lot of the conversation surrounding how much Katy Perry has fumbled the bag with 143 centres on it being, well, bad – which it is. But I put to you this: How shocked are we really that 143 by Katy Perry is so bad when, if you really think about it, aren’t all her albums kind of naff anyway?

I can currently feel as I type this the incensing of rage, the reddening of faces and the fury of fingers typing out “Teenage Dream is literally one of the best pop albums of all time.” And before we go any further, yes – fair enough. I am not a madman. Katy Perry’s second album Teenage Dream is clearly a pop bible – a seminal record of not just hit singles that even your nan could hum but excellent deeper cuts like Circle The Drain and Hummingbird Heartbeat. You can’t take away this album’s achievements and I won’t try to – even though, despite literally being a fan of it, I do not think tracks like Peacock or Last Friday Night are very good at all.

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Witness (A bad album)

Teenage Dream is her behemoth. But is anything else all that great? Her debut album One of the Boys is a fun but unmemorable record of pop rock tinged tracks that has very little staying power beyond its huge singles – the very ones that introduced Kathryn Hudson to the world as Katy Perry. The album that followed the stratospheric success of Teenage Dream, Prism, had equally big singles and some decent album tracks – Legendary Lovers, Spiritual and her best ever, Walking On Air. These two bookend albums aren’t bibles, but they’re serviceable pop records.

But then we begin to slip of course. When Katy Perry released Witness in 2017, she did so to much muddled mockery and heckles of “flop”. In relation to what 143 has received, I imagine she’d move mountains to get the middling scores of Witness. It’s not as bad as I remember it being, but still – not a great album. 2020’s Smile, despite having some of her best ever songs on it was as a body of work, very, very bad. If I’m honest, I hate it more than 143.

Smile (A very bad album)

My point is, beyond Teenage Dream, we aren’t dealing with a pop star with a great catalogue of albums in the first place. This isn’t like Madonna having a car crash album and ending a reign of utter classics – this is the nail in the coffin for a pop star who has some truly decade defining singles but never very often managed to make the albums stick the landing. On Metacritic, her albums have never scored higher than 61 – which she achieved for Prism.

It’s not that this is a reflection of Perry as a pop star. She performs great, has a powerful vocal and even this year showed at the VMAs why she’s a legend in her own right. But legends of performing do not always make solid albums.

143 is a mess, it is a disaster. But it is not wholly unsurprising. Katy Perry has been on a path of average albums that got worse over time – bad albums is kinda her whole thing. It never stopped her from being a huge success previously and getting an army of fans. Of which, for a lot of the time, you’ll be surprised to hear I’d consider myself one of. 143 will have a permanent legacy as one of the worst misfires of recent memory, but I don’t think it will be too long before Katy Perry releases another one of her consistently bad albums for us all to stream when we think no one’s listening.

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Featured image via @katyperry on Instagram.