Katy Perry is stepping into a new musical chapter, and her latest single seems to pull back the curtain on why things ended with Orlando Bloom.
The singer let go Band-aids on November 6, her first new song since news broke this summer that she and Bloom had called off their engagement.
Immediately signaling a very personal tone, the song opens with Katy at a kitchen sink accidentally dropping what appears to be an engagement ring down the drain.
As she struggles to achieve it, she delivers the striking lines: “Hand to God, I promise I tried / No stone was left unturned / It’s not what you did, it’s what you didn’t do / You were there, but you weren’t.”
From there the message becomes clearer.
Although she does not mention Bloom by name, she suggests that the emotional distance between them became too much to bear.
She goes on to talk about how she grew accustomed to disappointment, singing, “I’m so used to you letting me down / There’s no point in sending flowers now.”
The video mirrors that emotional pain with physical moments: Katy injures her hand at the garbage disposal and later falls from a tree.
The scenes reflect the emotional toll she describes, though she also acknowledges the fond memories of the relationship. She sings that there were beautiful moments and real joy, even though things fell apart in the end.
As the song progresses, she continues to talk about the feeling of being unheard, talking about how she was “flatlining to save this” as things slowly fizzled out.
Still, she refuses to see the relationship as a mistake. Towards the end of the video, as a train races towards her, she sees a daisy, an unmistakable nod to her daughter Daisy Dove, whom she shares with Bloom.
She then closes with the emotional line, “If I had to do it all over again / I would still do it all over again… The love we made was worth it in the end.”
Just days before its release, Katy teased the single with a close-up of scratches on her face and a simple white shirt paired with a necklace with her full name, Katheryn.
Band-aids does not provide a dramatic story, but it does indicate that unmet emotional needs may have played a crucial role in the couple’s separation.
Yet Katy chooses mercy and acknowledges both the pain and love that defined that chapter of her life.
