Katy Perry Stops Asking Permission to Be Angry on “Watch It Burn”

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• Setting the Fire
• The Sound: Pop-Rock With a Grudge
• The Visual: A Scorpion Walks Out of the Flames
• The Story Behind the Spark
• How It’s Landing
• Credits & Where to Stream

For most of her career, Katy Perry has built spectacle out of optimism. Fireworks, candy colors, roaring lions, glow-in-the-dark whipped cream — even her sadder songs tended to resolve somewhere hopeful. “Watch It Burn,” released June 25 through Capitol Records, is the first time the catharsis runs the other direction. There’s no rising above here, no light-and-love pivot at the bridge. Perry lights the match and stays to watch.

It’s a genuinely different register for an artist nearly two decades into defining what a pop chorus is supposed to do, and it lands at a pointed moment: her first new material since November’s “bandaids,” and the clearest signal yet of where her long-rumored seventh studio album — still only known by the placeholder KP7 — might be headed.

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“Watch It Burn” pulls from the same guitar-driven, anthemic pop-rock toolkit that built early-career hits, but the tempo and the temperament have both hardened. Where those songs read as flirtation, this one reads as a reckoning. The track was co-written by Justin Tranter, Eren Cannata, Jason Gill, Dan Crean, Kiddo A.I., and Skyler Stonestreet, with Cannata, Gill, and Tranter handling production — the same camp behind “bandaids,” which makes the two songs feel less like separate eras and more like a single emotional arc split across two singles eight months apart.

Critically, the track has been received as a genuine return to form rather than a retread. Clash Magazine’s review framed it as a more mature, more nonchalant, angrier sibling to Perry’s earlier pop-rock hits, scoring it 8/10 and singling out the song’s anthemic bridge as the moment most likely to detonate at festival sets this summer.

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The music video, directed by Christian Breslauer, picks up narratively where the “bandaids” visual left off — Perry moving from a state of bandaged, exposed vulnerability into something closer to a weapon. The clip follows her torching a city street before physically transforming into a scorpion-human hybrid, a none-too-subtle nod to her own zodiac placement and to the song’s overall thesis: destruction as the precondition for rebirth, not the opposite of it.

It’s a big, campy, maximalist visual in the way Perry’s videos have always been — there’s continuity there even as the emotional content has shifted. What’s changed is the metaphor doing the work. Where her 2010s videos turned heartbreak into whimsy, this one turns it into venom.

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Perry has been fairly direct about what inspired the song. Speaking with co-writer Justin Tranter on his podcast, Unfamous, she described spending most of her life suppressing anger she felt entitled to, rather than letting herself sit with it even briefly. The lyrics trace a relationship in which she felt consistently underappreciated, building toward a decision to finally walk away rather than keep absorbing it — context that lines up with her widely reported split last year from longtime partner Orlando Bloom, with whom she shares her daughter, Daisy.

The song also arrives at a moment when Perry has been publicly discussing a new relationship. At the New York premiere of her concert film, The Lifetimes Tour: Live From Paris, she described her current partner, former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as “the love of my life,” framing the relationship as a steadying counterweight to a career defined by constant motion. Whether or not that relationship factors directly into “Watch It Burn” itself, it’s hard not to read the song’s ending — less about who hurt her than about choosing herself going forward — alongside it.

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Early numbers suggest the song found its audience quickly: over a million Spotify streams on release day alone, reportedly the platform’s biggest same-day pop debut of the week, alongside a strong opening day on YouTube. Billboard’s reader poll the following weekend backed that up, with “Watch It Burn” topping a field that included new releases from TEEKS, Sombr, Gracie Abrams, and Phoebe Bridgers to win the publication’s favorite-new-music vote.

Critical and fan reaction has been a little more divided than the streaming numbers suggest, which tracks with how 2024’s 143 was received — fans on Album of the Year’s user review boards are split between calling it her most convincing pop-rock single in years and writing it off as a calculated course correction after that album’s rocky reception. Both readings can be true at once: it’s a song clearly built to win back goodwill, and it’s also, on its own terms, one of the more emotionally direct things Perry has put her name on in years.

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“Watch It Burn” is out now via Capitol Records as a digital single, paired with “bandaids” on streaming platforms. Songwriting credits: Katy Perry, Justin Tranter, Eren Cannata, Jason Gill, Dan Crean, Kiddo A.I., and Skyler Stonestreet. Production: Eren Cannata, Jason Gill, and Justin Tranter. The accompanying music video, directed by Christian Breslauer, is streaming on Katy Perry’s official YouTube channel.