Emily Mackay 

Katy Perry: Smile review – tireless trouper loses momentum

The US pop queen flits between styles on a fifth album that lacks focus
  
  

Katy Perry
Katy Perry: ‘She can do much better.’ Photograph: Liza Voloshin

Pop’s Queen Weeble, Katy Perry has made wobbling but never falling down her MO, belting out her chin-up, grin-on anthems tirelessly. Yet even she can’t power through 2020; her fifth album is coloured by a depressive period during which this all-American trouper found her work was no longer working for her.

At first it seems she’s bounced back undaunted: galvanising opener Never Really Over thrums with fizzing electro synths; Daisies pushes back against detractors with brio. Yet there’s a creeping lethargy, a sense that, at 35 and about to become a mother, Perry’s kitschy shtick of old doesn’t quite fit any more, but that she hasn’t found a way forward she can connect with. The cool, sultry Cry About It Later and the housey Teary Eyes aim at the sort of sad-party-girl pathos owned for eternity by Sia’s Chandelier, but feel forgettable and anonymous, as does the by-numbers trap pop of Not the End of the World.

The title track’s punchy, sunny west coast R&B groove and Only Love’s gospel-gilded 80s lustre go some way to lift the energy, but Smile closes on its weakest song, What Makes a Woman, a cliched, countryish musing on the supposed mystery of femininity (“Is it the way we keep the whole world turning in a pair of heels?” It is not). Perry can do much better. Hopefully come album No 6, that unwavering smile will go all the way to her eyes again.

Watch the video for Smile by Katy Perry
 

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