Lady Gaga has canceled Earth. She lives on planet Chromatica now. Yes, this is Stefani Germanotta’s return to all that is Lady Gaga: bizarre and theatrical and ambitious, swathed in electrodes, operating with a ga-ga-galaxy brain, delivering dance bangers for us canceled Earthlings. Chromatica is her first pop-pop album since 2011; unlike the non-“Why Did You Do That?” parts of the A Star is Born soundtrack and the beige acoustica of 2016’s Joanne, there’s not a ballad to be found. Specifically, according to Gaga lore, “Chromatica” is some kind of far-flung pink-prism Mad Max planet where “ballads are illegal.” Who doesn’t love world-building?
But while Chromatica is a return to Gaga’s dance-pop days, that doesn’t mean quite the same thing now. It’s been 12 years since her debut album The Fame, released when “EDM” was just corporate jargon and “dance” meant stompy electroclash. In 2020, a Lady Gaga dance album comes out as an unabashed revival of ’90s house music. But if anyone’s earned a trip to the house, it’s Lady Gaga, who is among the few big pop stars today who can legitimately be called a diva. When Gaga sings, she sings out: not chill, not Idol-pretty, but unafraid to go there, whether there be throaty rasps or sotto-voice commands or feral desperation. It’s why her hard-rock dalliances largely worked, and why Chromatica feels more substantial than other artists’ throwaway dance turns. So much nu-house is producer-driven, its vocalists reduced to decorations if even credited; there is no risk of this with Gaga. Everything here would be unmistakably her even if self-reference didn’t abound. Lead single “Stupid Love” salvages the juddering sequencer of “Do What U Want,” kicks up the speed, and weaves Gaga’s past lead singles around it like Maypole streamers: the oncoming-juggernaut heft of “Bad Romance,” the melodic contour of “Born This Way,” the conceit of “Applause.”
The other line about Chromatica is that it’s Gaga’s most personal album. You may recall that Joanne was also called Gaga’s “most personal album.” That time, it was “personal” in the same way all pop stars’ unplugged albums get called that: the arrangements had acoustic guitar, and the AutoTune was kept to a tasteful touch-up. Chromatica loses the guitars but certainly handles heavy subject matter: PTSD triggers, antipsychotic meds, sexual assault. In fact, most of Lady Gaga’s music since The Fame has been very personal. For every shiny, poppy song like “Telephone” or “Hair,” Gaga’s recorded three more with wounds at the core: the personified fears of The Fame, the parts of Born This Way that are more darkwave or Warcraft than bubblegum; the bitter mess of 2013’s Artpop. Themes recur: fragmented identity, soldiers to emptiness, drinking tears, dying a little when being touched. The art is often messy, the specific mess of art written from trauma. Even when Gaga dons freaky costumes or writes high-concept songs about Judas or swine, the artifice cracks. It’s why her albums hold up surprisingly well. It’s telling which Gaga moments have resurfaced from the early 2010s into current cultural memory: the deadpan, panting intro to “Monster,” or the sludgy-gothy “Bloody Mary,” which TikTok made even sludgier and gothier.