The savage reviews for Katy Perry’s new album are here, and they’re worse than anyone imagined

‘Painfully dated and glaringly out of touch’

2 hours ago

Oh, the 143 era for Katy Perry. A mess that will go down in history as one of the biggest fumbled comebacks of all time. The whole thing has played out like a sitcom about a pop star trying and failing to grasp the euphoria of her glory days. With the commercial disaster and critical flop of all the singles so far, every eye has been waiting for the reviews today to see if Katy Perry 143 is going to be as much of a disaster as we’ve all been braced for. Spoiler alert: It is. The reviews for Katy Perry 143 are utterly savage, so here’s a rundown of how bad it’s got for the once great pop legend.

The Independent: ‘Painfully dated and glaringly out of touch’

In a deeply savage two star review, The Independent raked 143 cross the coals. Whilst dragging the abysmal single Woman’s World to hell, the review repeatedly and rightly so criticises Katy Perry’s decision to work with Dr Luke as producer. It also says her once great commitment to the genre has been “replaced by a weariness (or perhaps wariness) of the industry she once dominated. Most songs here have an underlying hesitance, too preoccupied by their commercial aspirations to have any real fun.”

The Guardian: ‘Isn’t the calamity expected, but isn’t good either’

In a two star review, The Guardian rinses Katy Perry and the disaster 143 era for all its worth. “Commercially disastrous singles, online furore, being branded pop’s leading menace to the sand dunes of S’Espalmador, all in the space of a month. Were you Katy Perry, you might well consider just packing your comeback in, cancelling your forthcoming album and going home to quietly enjoy the fruits of the 100m-plus records you’ve already sold. After all, while it’s not guaranteed that a pop album preceded by two flop singles is a turkey, it’s 99% certain.”

Hilarious laughing at the sand dunes disaster. The review concludes with what it deems to be the big issue of the album: “It feels slightly out of time, a common-or-garden mediocre pop album with the misfortune to be scheduled in the wake of Charli xcx’s Brat, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet, a trio of messily inventive and hugely successful albums that collectively suggest a certain raising of the pop bar has taken place. What would once have sufficed, at least commercially, now won’t: that its author and her team didn’t notice seems far more intrinsic to 143’s downfall than questionable choices of collaborator, misfiring videos or indeed damage to the sand dunes of S’Espalmador.”

Yikes.

Clash: ‘The world has moved on’

In a 5/10 review, Clash says that 143 is essentially tired. “On ‘143’ however, there’s a feeling that the world has moved on – with Chappell Roan’s tour sparking Beatlemania-esque scenes of adoration and Sabrina Carpenter maintaining a stranglehold on the charts, you struggle to see where this playful yet unsatisfying record fits into pop’s firmament.”

Variety: ‘Looking back isn’t always the best path forward’

Katy Perry sought to recapture her heyday with this album, reuniting with old and much maligned collaborators – but Variety drags her for this failing. “143 could have been a record that harnessed that exact integrity, the same that punctuated the love-yourself smash Firework or triumphant Roar. But so much of that has been lost over time, perhaps because of the ever-changing landscape of pop music, or the shifting tide in celebrity culture. Perry seems unsure how to reclaim it, but as 143 proves, looking back isn’t always the best path forward.”

The reviews have been so savage – and Pitchfork hasn’t even released its scathing Katy Perry 143 verdict yet. The world waits.