Katy Perry - Smile
A remarkable number of artists that ascended in the late 2000’s continue to assert a huge amount of influence in the top ranks of pop music today. From Drake to Gaga, each performer has found a way to rise above the challenges of innovating and maintaining the interest of audiences with - hyperbolically speaking - the lowest attention spans in recorded history. With ‘Smile’, Katy Perry hesitates to move forward, resulting in her weakest record yet.
Having journeyed through prisms, mild existentialism, and the unforgettable sugar rush that was the now decade-old album ‘Teenage Dream’, many had anticipated the innumerable directions Perry’s fifth project could go in. A champion of charm and spectacle with whole lot of to talk about (see: pregancy, engagement, her journey through self-help), there was potential for something huge.
The trouble with ‘Smile’ is that Perry began its journey long before she knew what she wanted to say this time around. The discord is palpable - our first tastes of the album are over a year old, but felt promising. ‘Never Really Over’ would have made for a genuinely brilliant lead single, had it stayed that way. Of the album’s 11 tracks, its bombast ticks the most boxes on what fans should expect from a new Katy Perry era. It’s confrontational, cathartic, but still bright enough for a deserving spot on summer radio playlists.
Its follow-up, the sultry, neon tones of ‘Harley’s In Hawaii’ did not achieve the buzz the song deserved, and something must have changed in the strategy that followed. Several presumed singles were relegated to bonus tracks on the album’s end product, and a circus themed visual identity (hardly foreign to artists of decades past) sprung out of nowhere.
Its replacement, ‘Daisy’, has 73 million Spotify streams at the time of writing. Though there is a newfound warmth in the song now sharing a name with Perry’s newborn daughter, its melody is miles apart from its predessors. The layers of ‘Smile’ we have been left to unpeel wear very thin, it’s message of light and healing discordant with the circumstances we are faced with globally. This is not the fault of Perry, but keeps the impact of even the album’s brightest spots minimal.
During promotional work for 2017’s ‘Witness’, Perry stressed the importance of pushing limits and how it is essential to her identity as an artist. When, if any time, should we stop expecting well-established artists to break new ground when they have already contributed so much to how we listen to pop? Alternatively, is it necessary for an album’s production credits to hit double digits if nobody involved in the creation of this album seemed to be interested in aiding her evolution?
The closest we get are disco strings of fun-enough ‘Tucked’, or in the entertaining trap-pop of ‘Not The End Of The World’, but even they do not negate that even the album’s strongest non-singles could have passed as demos for projects dating way back. Everything circles back to having seen Perry do it all before, and much better.
Perhaps this is the stasis she has to go through in order to begin the next chapter of an enduring career at the top of that pop pyramid. It is near-impossible even for those with marathon-length careers to consistently produce great albums, after all.
But we have wanted that for Katy Perry, because you know that somewhere in her love for Big Statements there is still a great album to come, an album that’ll transport her into this decade in a way this one did not.
5/10
