Doctor! Doctor! Lady Gaga is back and she’s found a cure! “Disease”, the pop star’s first new solo release since 2020, lurches out of the dark to reveal the artist born Stefani Germanotta reanimated, stitches and bolts firmly in place. It’s her best in a long while: a potent dose of dungeon-dark electro-pop.
“Disease” arrives less than a month after the release of Harlequin, the companion album to Todd Phillips’s musical sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, in which she starred opposite Joaquin Phoenix. Widely derided by critics and disappointed fans, the film has limped out of public consciousness, while Harlequin didn’t fare much better. We all know Gaga can hold her own when it comes to the Great American Songbook, warbling show tunes with the best of them. The problem was that few of those covers captured the dark and twisted character she portrays in the film; most of the arrangements were far too polite to sound dangerous.
“Disease” has no such reservations. This is the first glimpse of Gaga’s forthcoming seventh album and, if it’s anything to go by, the prognosis seems excellent. Ironically, it sounds like something Gaga could have written while shooting Folie à Deux: beneath the clink of chains and crackles of electricity beats a warped, fantastical heart.
There are echoes of George Michael’s “Freeek!” in the squelching synth line and the way she snarls and growls with delightful abandon. This is maximalist in the extreme and the latest sign that the pop-culture temperature is rising (think Brat, think Rivals). Restraint be damned; we want excess, and lots of it.
“I could play the doctor, I can cure your disease/ If you were a sinner, I could make you believe,” she hollers on the chorus. Sure, it’s no Shakespeare – as with Miley Cyrus’s medically minded Pharrell Williams collaboration “Work It Out”, released earlier this year, Gaga goes heavy on the lyrical clichés. But that’s fine, particularly when she’s singing through a maze of thudding EDM and techno-heavy beats, grungy guitars and ominous layered harmonies.
With typical dramatic flare, she pares everything back on the final chorus to desolate piano notes and her diaphanous falsetto, before another growl and a final, rip-roaring salvo. “Disease” is like a defibrillator to the chest, jolting us out of our stupor. Welcome back, Mother Monster.
