Katy Perry aims for ‘celebratory’ feel with new ‘143’ album

Katy Perry’s new album title, 143, is code for “I love you”, based on the number of letters in each word of the phrase.

The Wide Awake hitmaker’s latest record was released on Friday and she hopes to evoke feelings of a “non-stop party” for those listening to her new material.

Katy Perry told The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1 that: “With this new record going out, the energy that I am hoping to create is celebratory, [it] is freedom. It’s freedom to be yourself, freedom to be sweaty, freedom to dance with a stranger. We used to live as tribes, we used to live in communes. We don’t have that as much anymore and you don’t get to experience that when you are in a live setting, you’re literally standing or sitting next to a person you’ve never met in your life, and you catch a lyric with them and they’re in your face, they’re connecting with you, and all of a sudden you don’t feel so alone. There’s that oneness feeling that’s so great about performing live,” she paused, adding “And what I hope to do with 143 is just a continual, non-stop party. Everyone’s invited, doesn’t matter who you are, eight to 80 all over the world. And that’s the kind of music I wanted to create for that live event. I think I’m having the most fun in my life.”

Katy explained that 143 is the first album she has released in her career from a position of personal and professional contentment.

The 39-year-old singer – who has daughter Daisy, four, with her fiancé Orlando Bloom – said: “When I was going through One of the Boys, which was, whoa, it was like, oh my God, hold on to this ride. And then Teenage Dream and Prism, my personal life was not really working. My professional life was working. And then when Witness shifted everything, it started to come more into balance and then Smile really solidified it.”

The artiste explained that the new album is a celebration of feeling and operating from a place of wholeness, a space she’s never written from before.

“I’ve always written a record from defence or not feeling enough or trying to transmute my trauma, whatever that was, and to change it. I always say this is the biggest lie I think artistes have ever been sold is that they have to stay in pain in order to create.”