It’s hard to understand what anyone, Katy Perry fan or otherwise, thought Witness was going to be before its release. Yes, we were promised a political angle. Yes, it was designed to usher in a new phase of Katy-dom. But minus the singer’s aesthetic evolution and her willingness to make a few political statements, Katy Perry is still the Katy Perry of Prism and the albums that came before it: a pop singer, a performer, and a person who understands the media machine well enough to know that grand statements of intent are a means of keeping us interested.

And then she dropped a totally average pop album.

To cite Witness as a musical disaster is a straight-up mistake, and it’s one more than a few critics have been making since its release on Friday. Its beats are strong, its hooks are catchy, and while the lyrics are hardly groundbreaking, any of us would be hard-pressed to argue that “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” delivered Pulitzer-worthy writing. Had Katy still been fronting as the Katy we knew — the singer who accessorized her candy-colored wigs with a whipped-cream bra — Witness might have been received as a reasonable, Pretty Okay™ offering. With so many ’90s-era dance influences (see “Roulette” and “Swish Swish”), the album would even have seemed in step with the current trend of prizing nostalgia above all else.

Instead, Katy used Witness to usher in a new persona, but she introduced that persona long before anyone could form any thoughts about the actual music — arguably as far back as 2015, when she started working with the Hillary Clinton campaign. Between the press tour, her simplified hair and makeup, and her affinity for slightly TMI on-camera confessionals, Witness became less an album than it did a reinvention. Since the music was the ostensible reason for all this transformation, it would have had to be phenomenal to live up to the hype.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not phenomenal. Witness isn’t bad, but it’s also not Harry Styles’s self-titled debut, the current holy grail of critically acclaimed pop-star transformations. Still, it’s an acceptable, listenable piece of pop, and delivers exactly what it should have had it not been sold as some big, defining moment in Katy’s career. No worse than Britney Spears’s Glory, Selena Gomez’s Revival, or Miley Cyrus’s Can’t Be Tamed, Witness delivers sweeping tracks like “Pendulum,” collaborations with artists like Migos, Nicki Minaj, and Skip Marley, and an emotional ballad produced by indie darlings Hot Chip (“Into Me You See”). So much criticism of the album ignores all that, though, and instead focuses on what it should have been rather than what it is.

Katy does seem to be going through some changes, both artistic and personal, and like her fellow pop stars before her — shoutout to Madonna, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and more — she’s putting it all out there for us to see in real time. Some artists keep everything close to the vest, but Katy operates under a policy of full disclosure, giving us step-by-step accounts of her intentions, her reasoning, and even her hair and makeup choices. That transparency gives us some insight into her state of mind, but it also strips the album of mystery, and mystery, in our 140-character reality, is a novelty we’ve come to cherish. There’s a reason people stayed in on a Saturday night to watch Lemonade, or why Lana Del Rey fans got psyched for a new release with nothing to go on but a cryptic, two-minute trailer. Surprise album drops — whether literal, like Drake’s More Life, or forewarned but shrouded in speculation, like Adele’s 25 — signal that the content’s so strong a proper press cycle isn’t needed.

By sharing so much of herself before Witness dropped, Katy deprived her audience of the opportunity to decide what Witness meant for themselves. Her weekend-long livestream contributed a lot to this problem. She ranked the famous men with whom she’s been involved, making it impossible for listeners not to equate certain songs with former partners. She tried tackling topics like cultural appropriation, but ultimately proved how little she understood the problem in the past and how little she understands it now. It also didn’t help that she staged each of these moments during an event that also featured stunts like cooking with Gordon Ramsay and flashing her butt during an on-camera massage.

All of that meant that we couldn’t work our way through the album, interpreting for ourselves who and what she was singing about; we couldn’t discover her newfound ’90s love on our own because she’d already told us about it. With albums like Harry Styles, Purpose, or even 1989, part of the fun is analyzing those records yourself. They all represented some surface-level musical evolution, but there were still enough secrets hidden in the lyrics to make you want to keep guessing. Instead of giving you room to play the game, the Witness promo tour laid out the expectations up front, then forced you to align Witness the album with those expectations. It never got to be just a pop album; it entered the world as a vessel for Katy’s latest persona.

But when you take Witness out of that context, it’s a completely acceptable record, especially when you remember that transitional albums are rarely appreciated until you see the bigger picture — think Lady Gaga’s Artpop or Rihanna’s Loud, two albums that have aged better than it seemed like they would when they first appeared. Katy, in her early 30s, has plenty of time to churn out future records that will incorporate what she’s learned while making and performing Witness. Like Katy, we also have time — time to figure out where this record fits in her career, whether it adds to her legacy, and if, outside the umbrella of the Katy rebrand, it deserves consideration on its own merit. Let’s not write it off just yet.