Katy Perry: Bandaids: Review. Last year Katy Perry seemed to be doing…

Last year Katy Perry seemed to be doing everything wrong. Her 143 album was panned by the public mostly due to her collaboration with a producer accused of sexual assault, the video for the lead single Woman’s World seemed to be soft porn for men and her brief space flight seen as just another example of a millionaire wasting money that could go to more worthy causes. 2025 hasn’t started off much better. Her Lifetimes Tour mishaps have been cannon fodder for social media content and most recently her engagement to Orlando Bloom came to an end. All that chaos would drive anyone crazy and want to hide for a while but not Katy. Instead, she went back into the studio and released that energy into music.

Bandaids, the first single of a new album, is Katy giving her thoughts and feelings on the most recent and most painful event, the end of her engagement. She’s broken up with Orlando before, and they got back together but it looks like this time it’s over. She’s also written about breakup before. One of her most memorable breakup ballads is Wide Awake from Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection album. This was about the end of her marriage to Russell Brand. In Wide Awake she expresses regret that she ever got into it and how hard it was to recover from the heartbreak of it.

Bandaids is similar to Wide Awake but while Wide Awake is a slow ballad, Bandaids is more uptempo. Instead of tlaking about being blind as she was in Wide Awake, she talks about the ups and downs of the relationship and how she was struggling to keep it together, putting bandages over the cracks in her heart. The accompanying video shows a distracted Katy having one disaster after another: getting her arm caught in a garbage disposal after her ring goes down it, getting her foot caught in an escalator because she forgot to tie her shoe, getting in a wreck because she was on her phone, getting her foot caught on the railroad tracks with a train coming and finally blowing herself up smoking a cigarette in front of a gas pump while Woman’s World, the single considered a flop plays in the background. The woman literally tries to spend nine lives in the video. But in the song, she does not regret the time she spent with Orlando and would do it all again if she could, a complete 180 from Wide Awake where she had no regrets at all, just relief that she got away. The change in perspective I feel is inspired not by Orlando but Daisy, the daughter they have together. In the train track scene, her seeing a daisy on the ground gives her the strength to free herself before the train hits her. Both she and Orlando have even stated that they want to focus on being a family for Daisy.

If there was a case to be made for Katy to make a comeback, this song would be it. Any woman who has gone through heartbreak and found the strength to go on can relate to the song. Some relationships we regret, some we look back on now with fondness. I have a feeling with this new album she is going to address the chaos of 2024 and early 2025 with a new maturity that was almost buried in 143 and I am looking forward to seeing it.