Smile

Even at its sweetest, Smile still feels like the the too-familiar work of a star committed to remaining pleasantly, fundamentally unchanged--and that may be the only mortal sin pop music can't forgive. [Sep 2020, p.100]

“Smile” has some sparklers. But if there’s any phrase that could be operative with any review of almost any Katy Perry full-length, it’s “mixed results,” and the new album is not about to tip that balance in any significant way.

Without fleeting moments of bad taste, Perry does indeed sound mature, but she's also not quite as fun. That's a conscious choice, though. Smile is intended to evoke memories of her frivolous younger days while pointing toward a sustainable pop future.

Like Joanne before Chromatica, Smile plays like a necessary centering exercise, indulging her insecurities and less surefire instincts. If Witness was overdetermined, Smile is an earnest exhale, for better or for worse. It delivers an image of her journey towards inner peace that is honest (if corny) and catchy (if not exactly inventive).

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.

Smile feels like it’s just kind of there. It just sits at the table surrounded by Perry’s past, which has some of the aforementioned biggest tracks of the ‘00s, and a couple of toe-dips into new territory which were at least commendable, but Smile just walks the line of enjoyable.

She has not made Smile to impress critics, but rather as an emotional catharsis, and in some tracks this catharsis does sparkle. But it would be great if, in her next creative venture, she focused less on just her smile, as wonderful as it is, and more on the complex emotions that make up the main draw of Smile.

“Smile” doesn’t have much of an agenda beyond a general feeling of uplift, and it has a lightness that makes it a better and more nimble record than its predecessor. All I’m asking of a Katy Perry song is for it to make me feel marginally happier than I did three and a half minutes prior. There are a handful of songs on “Smile” that do the trick. Though the singles have flopped, “Smile” provides an excuse to revisit them — most are better than they got credit for.

There’s nothing on this record to equal the giddy delight of Perry’s greatest hits. No fireworks to light up the dance floor, but enough to raise a smile.

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.

She stops trying to keep up with the Halseys and happily defaults to the fizzy bombast that is her stadium-size safety zone. [Aug 2020, p.72]

Rather than build on any of the sounds she experimented with in the past, Perry seems content to stay in her lane when, at this point, she has nothing to lose.

Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.

While Perry finds the occasional moment of quality here (Smile and Tucked both feel like the best possible music we could get from Katy Perry in 2020), Smile is an album searching for an identity—and when it fails, it falls back on lazy writing.

Perry has always been a top-notch entertainer, who tries on a range of styles and wants to make folks feel good. I’m not asking her to be anything else. But what comforted us before, both in pop and faith, doesn’t hit the same anymore.

It isn’t even that the songs are bad – it’s worse than that: they’re largely forgettable. Gone are the pithy couplets and catchier-than-a-rash hooks, replaced with lacklustre imitations.