Katy Perry’s new single “bandaids,” released in the wake of her incoherent and weak album, 143, unfortunately follows the same mediocre path of boring and unimpactful music. The song, which directly references her recent split from her ex-fiance Orlando Bloom, invokes sympathy from listeners. However, the single failed to attain the media attention expected from it.
Musically, “bandaids” follows all the “pop rules,” a superficial adherence ultimately leading to the underperformance of the song. Perry combines expressive and personal lyrism with an original pop melody and sound that many other popstars currently use in their songs. However, instead of attempting to recapture the same high-energy production and catchy lyrics heard in her 2010 album Teenage Dream—which includes hit pop singles like “California Girls,” “Teenage Dream,” and “The One That Got Away”—this song adopts a newer and overdone production style which currently litters the recent radio hits. Other pop stars like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato also previously dominated the charts during the 2010s. Nonetheless, they tend to follow the same declining quality of music transitioning into the 2020’s which have been dominated by artists like Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter.
Perry opens the song by singing a mediocre hook: “hand to God, I promised, I tried / There’s no stone left unturned / It’s not what you did, it’s what you didn’t / You were there, but you weren’t.” It maintains an obscure and unclear relationship narrative. Later in the song, she sings, “tried all the medications / Lowered my expectations, Made every justification / Bleeding out, bleeding out, bleeding out slow / Band-Aids over a broken heart,” highlighting her oversaturated and millennial lyrism as well as her failed attempt to create a metaphor for putting a “bandaid over [her] broken heart” to signal her moving on. The only part of the song that Perry succeeds in is the bridge, which contains the vulnerability fans have been craving as she progresses through her split. The bridge says, “if I had to do it all over again / I would still do it all over again / The love that we made was worth it in the end.” She references her suffering emerging from her relationship while also expressing the gratefulness she holds for her daughter, Daisy Dove Bloom.
Ultimately, “bandaids” struggles to recapture the same nostalgia and energy captured in Perry’s older work, offering moments of vulnerability amid a formulaic and overproduced sound that prevents the single from making a lasting impact.