Lady Gaga contains multitudes. There’s the pop disruptor, the alien force capable of re-writing the rules on a daily basis. There’s the big band singer, tapping into the American Songbook. There’s the lauded actress. Each thread is interwoven with the next, somehow making the striking, often clashing, creative cosmos that she draws on.
Fresh from her subverted-swing soundtrack to Joker: Folie a Deux, Lady Gaga taps back into her bedrock on this wild blast of outsider pop music. ‘Disease’ doesn’t so much land as crash down in an avalanche of daring ideas, the heavy-duty electronics more in-frame for a Nine Inch Nails album than, say, The Star Is Born. Lustful, salacious, and industrial, ‘Disease’ joins together body and machine in the most seamless fashion since Fritz Lang in his pomp.
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All heavy breathing, surging cries, and pride, ‘Disease’ lifts the electronics from her Chromatica era and builds some Brutalist architecture around it. In places, it’s jet black, thrilling to the bizarre, the remote, the incompatible. Yet it’s also a striking pop song – in places, the directness is punk-like in its energy, while the killer chorus ranks with some of LG’s best.
So, is this the first chord of LG7…? We were promised a pop record, and this certainly chimes with that boast – yet it’s pop in Lady Gaga’s own vision. A recent viral clip of a then-unknown pop icon performing to a spartan crowd reminded CLASH just how vital her rise felt, and how strange those initial hits actually were. It was complex, queer-coded, and difficult for outsiders to untangle. Somehow, it infected the world.
‘Disease’ is the next variant of her contagion. In tapping back into her roots, Lady Gaga seems to have found pop renewal, amid a clanking, mechanised, tech-fuelled landscape. Gazing beyond the culture bleakness of a pop-pandemic world, she might just be the chaotic cure.
Our mark? 9/10
Words: Robin Murray
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