It’s an inarguable tenet of pop standom that Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ is her crowning glory. But one underrated single since then deserves similar praise.
This should have been her «Espresso!»
Katy Perry’s had a few ups and downs in her music career, but when she hits, it’s pure pop perfection. The clearest example is her 2010 masterpiece Teenage Dream, which spawned a record-breaking pantheon of No. 1 singles and has been widely hailed as one of the most important pop albums in modern music. In the years since, Perry hasn’t quite managed to reclaim the earworm-y elation of her greatest work. especially not on her remedial, paint-by-numbers-feminism belter “Woman’s World,” best summed up by Dazed as “female empowerment filtered through the lens of a Ryan Murphy show.”
But there was one recent single that deserved the same praise her Teenage Dream bops received, and it’s high time “Never Really Over” gets its flowers.
In the 2019 lead single for Smile, Perry was finally able to hit the same sweet spot that made her best singles such irresistible confections. The wordy, tongue-twister chorus added a new layer (and a bit of an enticing challenge) to what made “Last Friday Night” so impossible to not sing along to. The explosive bridge provided the same euphoric release as the one in “Teenage Dream,” and the confessional lyrics added an unexpected pathos Perry hadn’t managed to infuse so seamlessly into her high-energy singles since “The One That Got Away” and “Part of Me.
