Lady Gaga - Chromatica

Pitchfork 73

With incomparable flair, the pop diva returns to her dance-pop days with a fabulously fun and deeply personal album that is at turns bizarre, theatrical, and ambitious.

The Guardian 0

Returning to the sound of her maximalist electro-pop heyday, Gaga explores buried trauma, mental illness and the complexities of fame on this return to form

A criticism often levelled at Lady Gaga is that the fantastical imagery she constructs around her albums eclipses the music itself. But it’s a sliding scale – and one that certainly mattered less when she was knocking out undeniable dance-pop party starters like Poker Face and Just Dance, or cementing her status as pop’s freaky outlier on the twisted Bad Romance. That she appeared in alien-like form in that song’s video made perfect sense: here was a chameleonic pop superstar in the vein of Bowie, Prince and Madonna opening a portal to an escapist dimension. Later, it made sense that she would lean into the imagery of hair metal on 2011’s gloriously OTT, Springsteen-referencing Born This Way. Yet on 2013’s bloated Artpop – billed as an exploration of the “reverse Warholian” phenomenon in pop culture, whatever that may be, and featuring at least one performance in which she employed a “vomit artist” to puke green paint on her chest – the aesthetic felt more like desperate distraction tactics.

Related: Lady Gaga's 30 greatest songs – ranked!

The Guardian 0

(Interscope)

After a po-faced stab at country, Lady Gaga returns to the land of make-believe on a vivid new album that excites and heals

What a relief: the “real” Lady Gaga is gone. For a while, it looked like pop’s high priestess of serious silliness was being sucked into the Slough of Authenticity – first with her supposedly stripped-back, country-inspired 2016 album Joanne (in truth, about as stripped back as Universal Studios is when compared with Disney World), then with her garlanded turn in A Star Is Born and its painfully earnest soundtrack album. 

Being real is a look every artist has to try on at least once, but it was never going to become Gaga’s signature style. Chromatica, her sixth album, brings back the spectacle, manifesting a parallel reality she’s had one foot in since childhood, centred on colour, kindness and connection. “Earth is cancelled,” she declared. “I live on Chromatica.” Coronavirus temporarily put a halt to the world-building begun in the Star Trek-flavoured video for lead single Stupid Love, forcing her to delay the album (she curated the One World: Together at Home concerts in the meantime) and leaving her summer tour up in the air. The songs, though, are more than vivid enough to conjure Planet Chromatica by themselves: Gaga’s always tended to overstuff her records, but the hit rate on these 16 tracks is her highest since the gothic techno cabaret of 2011’s Born This Way.