Katy Perry's 'Witness' is a fine breakup album. Why didn't she just say so?

Maeve McDermott | USATODAY

Katy Perry's Witness album was in trouble before it was even officially announced.

Negative headlines have plagued Perry throughout her album cycle for Witness, her fifth studio album 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 subsequently 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 the current 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 admitted was inspired by Perry. Like Perry, Mayer also hinted at their breakup on his own 2017 album The Search for Everything embarking on a successful redemption tour where the once-beleaguered singer granted candid interviews about fame and heartbreak. Ironically, despite the fact that Perry's profile skyrocketed in relation to Mayer's following their split, her ex's emotionally honest promo cycle would've suited her album far better than her fake-woke, Swift-baiting 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, crafting an alternate narrative around Witness in an attempt to elevate its subject matter. 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." And whether the exhausting saga of Witness ends up helping or hurting Perry's career, the track's gospel-thump chorus offers some consolation: "It's a pendulum / it all comes back around."