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1432
Album ∙ Pop ∙ 2024
When she skyrocketed to stardom at the tail end of the 2000s, Katy Perry was a girl-next-door gone wild: dancing on tables, kissing cherry-Chapstick-ed strangers, and shooting whipped cream out of her sparkly bustier. Her trademark hits represented pop as pure escapism—fun and frivolous, with production from the era’s biggest hitmakers (Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke). Sixteen years after her breakthrough with 2008’s “I Kissed a Girl,” the era from which Perry emerged has cycled back into fashion as a nostalgic trend. But on her sixth album (not including her contemporary Christian record as Katy Hudson), named for her angel number—and for how people typed “I love you” back in the pager era—the 39-year-old singer is focused on the present.
“When I was going through [2008 debut album] One of the Boys, it was like, ‘Oh my god, hold on to this ride!’” Perry tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, tracing the arc of her career as it pertains to her emotional life. She describes Teenage Dream and PRISM as periods of professional highs and personal turmoil. With 2017’s Witness, her world began to balance; that stability solidified on 2020’s Smile. “And now, 143 is the celebration of that wholeness, which is a space I’ve never written a record from,” she continues. “I’ve always written a record from defense, or not feeling enough, or trying to transmute my trauma. The biggest lie I think artists have ever been sold is that they have to stay in pain in order to create. That’s absolutely not true.”
Four years after her last album, 143 arrives as a full-on dance record, sampling liberally from Crystal Waters’ 1991 classic “Gypsy Woman” on the Doechii collab “I’M HIS, HE’S MINE” and venturing deeper into piano house on the euphoric “LIFETIMES.” As for whether songs like “WOMAN’S WORLD” are works of high camp or the remains of a bygone era, your mileage may vary. “I just wanted to explore other territories; I didn’t want to keep repeating myself,” Perry says of her pivot to the dance floor. “The energy I’m hoping to create is freedom to be yourself—freedom to be sweaty, freedom to dance with a stranger.”
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