Review: Heartbreak drives Katy Perry’s ‘Witness’
Katy Perry’s album Witness was in trouble before it was even officially announced. Negative headlines have plagued Perry throughout her album cycle for Witness, her fifth studio effort, out Friday. First, she positioned her album as “purposeful pop,” releasing lead single Chained to the
Rhythm and promising a political album in interviews. Then she switched gears and released the ill-advised Migos collaboration Bon Appetit and the maybe Taylor Swift diss track Swish Swish, dredging up her exhausting feud with Swift in an interview with James Corden that nobody asked for. Both singles underperformed on both the charts and the Internet, with critics mocking her for dabbling in hip-hop and dabbing on Saturday Night Live.
The biggest shame of all? Perry didn’t have to do any of this. Despite everything its lead singles and marketing campaign led listeners to expect, Witness is neither Perry’s political manifesto nor an album of embarrassing hip-hop appropriation. The album Perry actually released is sonically coherent and entirely uncontroversial, its decent songwriting mostly focused on her wounded heart. Arguably, it’s one of her most personal records to date, and yet the marketing focused on everything but.
Witness finds Perry in a troubled mood, dominated by gloomy synth-pop that’s sonically cohesive but rarely joyful, a departure from candy-colored singles of her earlier career. Part of the reason for Perry’s soured mood may be today’s political climate, with tracks like Witness and
Bigger Than Me hinting at the socially aware pop Perry promised her fans.
But the album’s most salient narrative isn’t one of protest but one of heartbreak. Many of Perry’s best tracks have been revealing postmortems on her previous relationships, from her triumphant 2010 hit Part of Me to the revealing piano ballad By The
Grace of God from 2014’s Prism. While these previous tracks addressed Perry’s divorce from Russell Brand, Witness sees Perry haunted by the high profile of another famous ex, likely her former beau John Mayer. She spies his SUV on Sunset Boulevard on the poignant Save as
Draft, an of-the-moment ode to busy schedules and electronic communication wreaking havoc on love. “Saw your picture on accident / Your face has changed, the lines are sinking in” she sings on Miss You More before pressing play on one of his songs. Perhaps that song was Still Feel
Like Your Man, Mayer’s new single from earlier this year, which he publicly said was inspired by Perry. Ironically, despite the fact that Perry’s profile rose after their split, her ex’s promo cycle would’ve suited her album far better than her fake-woke, Swiftbaiting antics.
Instead, Perry sold Witness as a political statement and paired it with an alienating marketing campaign, a self-defeating process that undermined the album’s many strengths. Five albums into a successful pop career, she deserves some credit for trying to do something new. Still, Perry should’ve taken a second listen to the advice on the penultimate track Pendulum: “Don’t try and reinvent your wheel, cause you’re too original.”