If there was ever a year in recent history where we need a piece of uplifting pop music to remind us to smile, this would be it. Thankfully, Katy Perry has come to the rescue with her infectious new earworm “Smile,” which will put some pep in your step and a smile on your face. Sure, that smile is mostly covered by a mask, but there will still be a twinkle in your eyes.Released late on Thursday, Perry’s “Smile” is the latest anthemic pop single from the Grammy winner, giving fans a track that is reminiscent of her earlier work, including “Teenage Dream,” “Roar” and “Firework.” Sharing the song on social media, Perry said she was inspired to write “Smile” after going through a period of depression. “I wrote the title track from the album when I was coming through one of the darkest periods of my life and had lost my smile,”
writes Perry. “This whole album is my journey towards the light - with stories of resilience, hope, and love.”
Perry alludes to the ‘dark period’ in the lyrics for the song, singing “Had a piece of humble pie / That ego check saved my life.” Perry recently teased her new single and elaborated on the difficult period in her life, which included the underwhelming response to her 2017 album
Witness. The album failed to capture the massive sales and top chart positions of her previous releases, including 2013’s
Prism and 2010’s
Teenage Dream, which debuted at number one on Billboard and made Perry the first female artist to have five number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 from the same album (Michael Jackson’s
Bad is the only other album to have achieved this feat).[video_embed id='1986883']RELATED: Katy Perry opens up about the time her and Orlando Bloom broke up[/video_embed]At the same time that Perry was releasing
Witness, she was also going through a breakup with her now-fiancé Orlando Bloom. Speaking to
q on CBC in June, Perry said “I lost my smile. I don’t know if my smile was ever fully, authentically mine but I was riding on the high of a smile for a long time. Which was the validation, love and admiration from the outside world… and then that shifted.”Perry said that the culmination of disappointments in her career and personal life took a toll on the singer. “My career was on this trajectory when it was going up, up and up, and then I had the smallest shift, not that huge from an outside perspective. But for me it was seismic,” she said. “I had broken up with my boyfriend, who is now my baby-daddy-to-be, and then I was excited about flying high off the next record and the record didn’t get me high anymore. The validation didn’t get me high, and so I just crashed.”Perry’s new single finds the value in painful lessons as the popstar sings “But every tear has been a lesson / Rejection can be God's protection / Long hard road to get that redemption / But no shortcuts to a blessin'.” As well as name checking her
American Idol co-judge Lionel Richie and his infectious smile, Perry may have delivered the most 2020 line her new song, singing “Every day, Groundhog Day.” Same, Katy.Not only did Perry release her new single on Thursday, she also announced that “Smile” will act as the title track to her upcoming sixth studio album, which will be released on August 14. The pregnant popstar has already released the singles “
Never Worn White” and “
Daisies” this year, showing off her changing body in the songs' music videos.[video_embed id='1991544']BEFORE YOU GO: Man yells at elderly woman over wearing a mask[/video_embed]
