(Capitol)
Following disastrous comeback singles and videos prompting environmental investigation, Perry’s seventh album isn’t the calamity expected – but it isn’t good, either

The video for Katy Perry’s recent single Woman’s World concluded with the artist being hoisted aloft, clinging to a helicopter’s door frame with one hand, brandishing a ring light in the shape of the medical pictogram for “female” and bellowing “I’M KATY PERRY!” It was clearly intended as the grand denouement of a big comeback, four years after her last album, Smile: a long time in an era when pop artists seem to constantly provide new material to streaming services. All the stops had been pulled out to ensure a massive hit – a chorus evidently designed to be sung en masse at karaoke by makeshift distaff choirs (and perhaps, as one reviewer suggested, to be lip-synced to on RuPaul’s Drag Race) and a video that attempted to both tick some culturally relevant topics and provoke a TikTok dance craze, its steps briefly shown towards the end.

But things really didn’t work out as intended: Woman’s World was very coolly received indeed. There was a great deal of chatter online about the advisability of releasing a song, ostensibly about female empowerment, co-written and produced by Dr Luke – a man previously accused of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by his ex-collaborator Kesha, although he countersued her for defamation and they settled out of court – accompanied by a video, also ostensibly about female empowerment, that spent a remarkable amount of time offering up lingering shots of ladies’ buttocks and cleavages, the artist’s included. Perry defended the latter as satire rather than a cartoonish attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, but that seemed to butter few parsnips. Having clearly landed wrong, Woman’s World limped into the lower reaches of the charts, then keeled over entirely.