Between rows of Spandex at Forever 21, in the back of a cab coming home from the bar, after losing your headphones at the gym—in a pandemic, all the ideal templates for listening to Katy Perry have disappeared. No more can the pop star’s songs seep into the background of a normal social life, clunking around in your head before you even know their titles; you have to actively opt into her new album and launch yourself willingly into its suffocating glitz. Smile is meant to be a “picture of RESILIENCE & GRATITUDE,” Perry writes in the liner notes. Those capital letters—the sense that someone is shouting at you—come through in the music. “Yeah, I’m thankful/Scratch that, baby, I’m graaateful,” she croons in the title song. “I am resilient!” she belts on another, six times in two minutes. “It’s not the end of the world!” she promises over a flailing disco beat, before launching into a pseudo-rap about a fortune teller and “flipping off the flop,” whatever that means.
These songs wink at global devastation the same way commercials for online car dealerships and door-delivered Chick-fil-A do—in these challenging times, convenience and the power of positivity will get us through. Pop music, and Katy Perry in particular, have used this tactic before. “Put your rose-colored glasses on, and party on,” she cooed on 2017’s Witness, an album of what she called “purposeful pop,” designed to yank the listener into a newfound social consciousness. She performed the lead single at the Grammys wearing a pink rhinestone PERSIST armband as an image of the Constitution rose behind her. She jammed the album with whomping bass and assertions that a woman could be both “feminine and soft,” “a babydoll with a briefcase,” and promoted it with a 72-hour livestream, therapy session and all, staking her activism on the idea that all vulnerability is radical. In one clip, she sat cross-legged on an immaculate white couch and apologized for her history of cultural appropriation. The camera panned to a flickering display of the album cover. “I’ll never understand, because of who I am,” she murmured. We were meant to connect the dots between parceled honesty and political stances, between an oddball “diss track” against Taylor Swift and a broad stance on female empowerment.
Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. “They tell me that I’m crazy, but I’ll never let them change me!” she sing-shouts on “Daisies,” as limp EDM beats fill the background. The relentless spangle on Smile can seem jarring as Perry attempts to both nod to and avoid the pandemic-shaped elephant in the room. “It’s no funeral we’re attending,” she scoffs on “Not the End of the World.” There’s a song about postponing crying to go out and dance; there’s a separate track about dancing while crying. These are big-production tracks primed for maximum drama—shrieking electro violins, skittering beats, flecks of dubstep and disco—but the clumsy lyrics hamper any emotional payoff.