Chromatica review: Lady Gaga's dance opus exorcises the ghost of ARTPOP

Lady Gaga understands pop music like no other. This has always been clear from the very start of her career when her debut single Just Dance ushered in – by sheer force of will – a new era of synth-pop supremacy. 

She has both used the genre for her own ends, but also nominated herself as its defender. In early promo she declared that ‘pop music will never be low-brow.’ 

Chromatica, Gaga’s sixth studio album and first solo release since 2016’s Joanne, is a return to those roots. There is certainly pop music on Chromatica, and it is definitely not low-brow, although it’s not as experimental or intelligent as some of her previous work. 

This is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta we’re talking about, though, and the woman has never met a concept that she couldn’t embrace. If 2013’s ARTPOP wanted to change the face of pop on Earth, then Chromatica’s mission is to take us off our own planet entirely, and escape into a new universe, one of Gaga’s own making. 

Gaga has never lacked ambition – in fact, her entire discography can be read, at times, as a battle against her own ambitions – but Chromatica’s lofty thematics are met with an equally bulletproof approach to pop music that recalls her debutante days, when no-one seemed to command or understand the power of pop better than Lady Gaga. 

Lead single Stupid Love – her first collaboration with Swedish mastermind Max Martin – set Gaga’s intentions clear from the off. This was, above all else, a return to the dancefloor, a space no other artist has battled for harder. As she sings in the cathartic Free Woman: ‘This is my dance floor, I fought for.’ 

Chromatica is an album about healing and about escape, it takes the transformative power of pop music and applies it to Gaga’s own trauma, which she lays bare on the record.

Alice, a career-best achievement, has a stuttering, EDM beat, but speaks of its artist’s struggles to find a place where she truly belongs. ‘My name isn’t Alice,’ she announces. ‘But I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ The same is true for 911, a song about anti-psychotic medication, where she says ‘my biggest enemy is me.’

For the Alejandro hitmaker, her battle with chronic pain disorder fibromyalgia as been well-documented, and the LP’s steam-punk aesthetic, as well as its frequent references to technology and space, seek to place Gaga away from her pain, and rebuild her as something new, somewhere new.

Collaboration is a new side to Gaga that her visit to Chromatica seems to have brought out the best in; from K-pop sirens BLACKPINK in the brittle Sour Candy, Sir Elton John for the electronica-influenced rumination on mortality Sine From Above, where Gaga dreams of dying and becoming one with music again. The album’s biggest pure-pop success comes with Ariana Grande in the form of disco monster Rain On Me, a modern-day rewrite of No More Tears (Enough is Enough).

‘I hear the thunder coming down,’ Ariana croons. ‘Won’t you rain on me?’ It speaks to the horrors both she and Gaga have endured during their time both in the public eye and away from it. As we were always told, fame is indeed a monster, but one that isn’t welcome on this new planet. 

We brought up ARTPOP earlier, and its a pivotal reference to make for Chromatica, that takes all the ambition and creativity of Gaga’s ill-advised third LP, but transfers its manic energy to a streamlined sheen where Gaga seems completely in control, instead of riding a manic beat and spirit too wild to tame. 

The only songs that don’t land or hit particularly as hard as the rest – Replay and 1000 Doves (the latter of which must be repurposed for a 2021 Eurovision entry immediately) speak to one criticism of the album, and that it’s Gaga at her most commercial, but also her most sanitised.

These songs will not change the face of pop music, as Poker Face or Bad Romance did before them, but they will make people very happy. And if true artistry is learning to accept that people need what they think they want, then who can fault her?

Fittingly, our visit to Chromatica ends on a revelatory note. Babylon – which references both the ancient city the song takes its name from and a clever play on the nature of gossip – will be played at gay clubs across the galaxy for years to come, alongside its sonic sister, Vogue by Madonna – both songs that address the need for acceptance on the dancefloor, whether’s it BC or AD.

‘Talk it out, babble on, battle for your life,’ Gaga decrees. It’s an M.O that she’s fulfilled well with Chromatica, her most cohesive and coherent album since 2011’s well-meaning but overshot Born This Way. 

Lady Gaga understands pop music like no other, but sometimes she’s guilty of letting the art overshine the pop. With Chromatica, she both makes a comeback and an artistic re-birth.

No pop album this year has made us happier to listen to.

Chromatica is out now.

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