Thus far, 2024 has proved a decidedly mixed bag for Lady Gaga. On the plus side, her duet with Bruno Mars, Die With a Smile was a huge global hit: nine weeks after its release, it is still resident in the UK Top 3 and is the second most-streamed song in the world on Spotify. But then there was the debacle of Joker: Folie à Deux, and her accompanying album Harlequin was released to a very muted critical and commercial response. Gaga has done an impressive job of carrying her audience along with her throughout an eclectic approach to pop in which arty synthpop coexists alongside stadium-sized soft-rock, country-infused Americana and vocal jazz – but she seemed finally to have lost them: a third album of standards, this time without her late duet partner Tony Bennett, and allied to one of the year’s biggest box office bombs, apparently proved a step too far.
Perhaps she can rectify things with Disease, a song that that ignores the fact that her biggest successes in recent years have been power ballads – not just Die With a Smile but the 10m-selling Shallow – and returns her to old-fashioned Gaga territory. Certainly, her stans seem to think she can. Within hours of the single appearing, one of them had worked up such a froth they posted a 1,500-word online essay comparing its lyrics to Sylvia Plath, Baudelaire and the sonnets of John Donne, which even those impressed with the sexually forthright thrust of its chorus – “lay you down like one-two-three, your eyes roll back in ecstasy” – might think amounts to gilding the lily a little.
But you don’t have to go that far to think Disease could conceivably have slotted on Gaga’s debut album The Fame. It involves fizzing, distorted synths playing dark minor chords; a pounding, slightly industrial four-to-the-floor beat; vocals in the strident, imperious mode of Poker Face or The Cure; and lyrics that, if they don’t bear much resemblance to the work of the Metaphysical poets, do seem a bit dominatrix-y: “Screaming for me baby, like you’re gonna die.”
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It’s very well produced, and if the song doesn’t have the undeniable, head-turning, instant-classic quality of Bad Romance – it lacks the element of surprise found in that track’s brilliant melodic and tonal shift from dark-hued verses to sunlit Abba-esque chorus – its excessive, more-is-more sound and mood manage to evoke memories of late 00s Gaga and still fit with the messy, post-Brat pop climate. Which makes a kind of tenuous sense: on arrival, with her meat dresses and faintly chaotic, blood-spattered, downtown-performance-art-inspired live shows, Lady Gaga felt like a disruptive force, her cage-rattling effect on pop not a million miles removed from Charli xcx’s this summer.