Katy Perry - Smile

Pitchfork 57

Katy Perry’s bubbly, cliché-ridden pop feels especially unsuited for life in a pandemic. But despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing chart-topping formulas.

The Guardian 0

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

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.

Related: Katy Perry: 'I've done a lot of falling flat on my face'