Katy Perry – Roar: New music
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Miley Cyrus'ratchet reinvention aside, so far 2013 has been a relatively quiet year for pop, defined mainly by Beyoncé's inability to release a song longer than a ninety second advert. With Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience album marred by a dearth of actual tunes (not including the amazing Mirrors), pop has become a bit bland. This month, however, sees the return of both Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. While the former is trailing her third album ARTPOP with a mixture of wooden limb-obsessed 'art' films anda video promoting Marina Abramovic's Kickstarter campaign that involves her hugging a giant crystal and speaking in tongues, Perry's campaign for the forthcoming Prism album has been faultless. Firstly, the album's title was unveiled via a giant gold truck that's been driving around America (although thatcame a cropper over the weekend), while thefirst teaser trailer to emerge saw Perry dressed as a mixture of Daria and Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice setting fire to the blue wig that defined the campaign for her last album, Teenage Dream. This was followed bya funeral featuring the burying of some of the outfits from that era, Perry sarcastically mourning the loss of a dress with a rotating bra. For thefourth and final video we find her clomping her way into a studio sporting a satin jacket and moodily putting on some headphones. In case you haven't studied semiotics, basically she's trying to tell us that the candy-coated, whipped-cream spraying, nudge-nudge-wink-wink Katy Perry of old is long gone, replaced by an angrier, newly-divorced powerhouse.
So while the videos hinted at something slightly gothic-inspired, the album's first single, Roar – which leaked over the weekend ahead of its original premiere later today – sounds slightly toothless on first listen. Written and produced by the same people that worked on most of Teenage Dream (Dr Luke, Max Martin and songwriter Bonnie McKee), it's a mid-paced stompalong that touches on the fall-out from her marriage to Russell Brand in the verses ("You held me down, but I got up"), before exploding into a stadium-ready chorus that comes fully loaded with self-empowerment chants ("I got the eye of the tiger, the fighter, dancing through the fire"). At first, its radio-friendly precision is almost unnerving, but the success of Roar lies in its simplicity - it's a massive single from a massive pop star who knows exactly what she's doing, i.e. that if you put a drop just before the gigantic final chorus that you're basically onto a winner.
Roar is out on 8 September.