Katy Perry, Smile, review: when life gives you lemons, make sweet, fizzy pop

It’s been exactly 10 years since Katy Perry’s world-conquering Teenage Dream was released. It cemented her as a household name, spawned hits on hits and is widely regarded as one of the best pop albums of the new millennium. Perry looked like a candy-coloured Disney Princess, always with a ready grin and an inescapable song for every wedding reception or H&M changing room.

The Katy Perry of 2020 couldn’t be in a more different place: coming off the back of a major flop (2017’s Witness), she’s struggled with public criticism, break-ups, crippling depression, make-ups and now, at 35, she’s about to become a mother. The goofy teenage dreamer has grown up. The question that lingers over her fifth studio album, Smile, is whether or not her music has too.

Pop music has long been dismissed as something frivolous for the young. Though that tide is turning, there is still some expectation that artists will turn from pop to more “serious” genres as they age. Kylie Minogue went country, Taylor Swift went indie, Justin Timberlake became the Man of the Woods – Katy Perry’s mid-career crisis was instead one of content.

Doggedly aiming for the mainstream that she had so effortlessly ruled before, Witness was released in 2017 to not much more than a sigh and a roll of the eyes from many corners. Keeping it electropop, Perry wanted to create something socially conscious, serious, something ‘woke’. But it missed its mark spectacularly, with Perry’s marketing ploys feeling increasingly desperate. (There were so many videos of her surprising fans by popping up in unexpected places that you half expected her to be on the till at Sainsbury’s every time you went in.)

The songs were too busy trying to hammer a point home to bother with any inventiveness or likability. Witness scrambled to number six in the UK album charts then disappeared from the top 40 within a month – not exactly the numbers you’d expect from one of the most recognisable pop stars in the world.

For all its good intentions, Witness felt tired. But on Smile, Perry sounds rejuvenated. It’s a relief to hear her double down on what she does best: fizzy bops, huge hooks and about as much emotional subtlety as a sledgehammer. Smile skips easily from pure pop to clubby, euphoria-chasing dance with a dash of introspective gospel thrown in. Perry may have been in pain but her music refuses to wallow.

Trying to shed all the criticism levelled at her both by the world and herself, many songs deal with Perry’s rebirth into the world. With no attempt at subtext, the song Resilient is about how, resilient she can be, Not the End of the World tries to convince itself that harsh criticism isn’t the end of the world, while Teary Eyes is about dancing with teary eyes. Crying on the dancefloor is generally accepted as a subsection of pop music but rarely do popstars take it so literally – though to give Perry her dues, the electro-dance number is shot through with a jittery desperation that fits the brief perfectly.

It’s hard not to draw parallels between Smile and Lady Gaga’s Chromatica, also released this weird summer. Gaga’s album echoes many elements of Smile: repurposed classical music, power in suffering, a desire for people to “look at me” in an effort to be truly seen. Compare Gaga’s Stupid Love – the aural equivalent of stalking on to the dancefloor to lead a romantic prospect around by the tie – to Perry’s Resilient, which wants you to see beyond the surface: “Look at me now I’m in full bloom... look at me now I light up the room”. The difference is that Gaga’s excess and hyperbole is matched by an amphetamine-fuelled beat and a manic sort of joy; Perry’s album flirts with fun but often feels so earnest that it strays into cringe-worthy territory.

On the rousing Only Love Perry sings, “86,400 seconds in a day/I swear lately most of them have been a waste” which, let’s face it, hits different after three months of lockdown. It’s a very contemplative song with the kind of lyrics you would write in your mid-30s as mortality begins to loom; rejecting the little things and embracing the relationships that make your life a life. Perry’s Christian rock pedigree winds through its anthemic drums and the litanish timbre of the chorus, not so much a hook as a to-do list for the end of the world.

But you don’t come to Katy Perry for depth. What’s made her special in the past is that lightning jolt of emotion that rushes through the layers of sugary-sweet pop; that’s what made lusty adolescent hormones surge as you listen to Teenage Dream, what made donning a leopard print two-piece seem like an empowering move on Roar. It’s there on Smile but you have to work for it. The album excels on tracks like Never Really Over and Cry About It Later, both of which have a gleefully destructive air, not to mention killer choruses. Life may have beaten some of the freewheeling excitement from Katy Perry’s work but she’s not about to let it go completely. Smile still has a twinkle in its eye – it’s just that sometimes that twinkle is a tear.

Smile is out August 28 on Capitol Records