‘Woman’s World’ Is the Stalest Sort of Retread

Photo: Katy Perry via YouTube

This review of “Woman’s World” was published on July 12, 2024. On September 20, Katy Perry released her album 143.

When a major pop star needs a hit, they usually know who to call first. For Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, it’s Max Martin; for Justin Timberlake, it’s Timbaland; for Taylor Swift, it’s Jack Antonoff. For Katy Perry, unfortunately, it’s Dr. Luke. Since they struck a partnership in 2007, Lukasz Gottwald has co-produced eight of Perry’s nine No. 1 songs. No one’s been more crucial to Perry’s pop success than Luke, and no artist built Luke’s mainstream profile more than Perry.

And this year, Perry needed a hit. She hadn’t reached the top ten since “Chained to the Rhythm,” the leadoff to her confusing 2017 album, Witness. Coincidentally, that was her first project without Luke, who was accused of sexual assault by Kesha in 2014 and had been lying low in the industry since. Other past collaborators like P!nk and Kelly Clarkson disavowed him, but never Perry. 2024 was starting to feel like a comeback year, with Perry leaving her role on American Idol and eyeing a redemption for her tepid showing on 2020’s Smile. So, allegations be damned, she needed her big gun to produce a new single and recapture some of their electric connection. Too bad that song, “Woman’s World,” sounds like the stalest sort of retread.

It’s technically sound, sturdy even. The beat itself is a textbook take on dance-pop, little more than a gurgling bass and a thumping drum — a track that can get into the club but will never be a highlight of the night. (Perry’s target sounds like Confessions-era Madonna, but the sound is diluted so much that fans immediately compared it to Lady Gaga’s 2020 single “Stupid Love” instead.) Perry reminds us of her vocal talent without oversinging. Sonically, the chorus even packs some punch, with one of those mighty top-line melodies Perry used to deliver reliably.

But an anthem needs a message too, and “Woman’s World” doesn’t have one to offer. The song is stuck in vague feminist empowerment, which may have worked in 2014 but falls short in 2024. The verses are a deluge of superlatives that don’t add up to much: “Sexy, confident / So intelligent / She is heaven-sent / So soft, so strong.” No, it’s not campy, it’s just obvious — even more in the video, where Perry shows that yes, women can work construction and drink whiskey too. Pop fans can hear more compelling takes on womanhood from Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Ariana Grande this summer, so why settle for Perry reminding us that, baby, women ain’t going away? That’s all without accounting for Luke’s presence on “Woman’s World,” which negates the song’s entire message. It takes a level of cognitive dissonance to sing about strength and sisterhood over a beat co-produced by an alleged rapist. (When Luke and Kesha settled his defamation lawsuit in 2023, he continued to deny wrongdoing.) As a project, the song has empowered more men than women: Perry’s writing team included four men in total, plus Chloe Angelides, a writer published by Luke’s Prescription Songs.

In many ways, “Woman’s World” resembles “Roar,” the last lead single that Luke produced for Perry, in 2013. She had something to prove then, too, following the runaway success of Teenage Dream in the early 2010s, and she proved it with another vague, confident anthem featuring another hefty, hooky chorus. It worked, too — “Roar” hit No. 1, set her fourth album Prism up for success, and now has over a billion streams on Spotify. Calling Luke for the job of “Woman’s World” may not be defensible, but it’s at least understandable — he’d earned multiple hits since his comeback earlier this decade, including two No. 1s. But most of those new songs sounded lazy, lacking the energy and spryness that defined his early work with Perry. “Woman’s World,” a song that’s totally hollow beneath its just-strong-enough bones, is no different. Perry is trying to return to a world that’s just not there anymore.

Note: A previous version of this piece misattributed a quote by Luke’s lawyers to Perry’s lawyers that has since been removed.