Lady Gaga’s ‘Chromatica’ is a club album at a time when there are no clubs

IT wasn’t too long ago that Lady Gaga’s pop career seemed to have fallen on difficult times. Her last purely pop album was the 2013 avantgarde pastiche “Artpop.” Her last good pop album was “Born This Way” in 2011, several lifetimes ago. She has since made a record of jazz standards with Tony Bennett, detoured into soft rock on “Joanne” and won an Academy Award for best original song for “Shallow,” the song that accompanied her film debut in “A Star Is Born.”

“Chromatica,” released last week, heralds Gaga’s inevitable return to pop music. While it lacks the scenery-chewing adventurousness of her best work, it’s her finest and most consistent album since “Born This Way.”

“Chromatica” gallops through virtually every EDM subgenre of the past 30 years, but does not linger. Almost every one of the album’s 16 tracks, besides three instrumental interludes, clocks in at around three minutes, a formula for maximal streaming success, which suggests its biggest influence may not be Madonna, Daft Punk or any number of lesser-known deep house artists, but Lil Nas X, king of the replay button.

That it feels at all cohesive is a credit to Gaga and her coexecutive producer BloodPop, who shepherds a team of grandees that includes Max Martin, Skrillex and exactly one female producer out of roughly a dozen. For a pop album, this qualifies as a lot.

In a recent interview, Gaga told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that “Chromatica” is informed by her mental health battles and the residual trauma of a past sexual assault. It’s a dance-throughthe-pain collection of what the British call “sad bangers,” and while it feels like something that arrived from another planet and is now marooned here, a club album when there are no clubs, the isolation at its mournful heart couldn’t be more suited to the moment. “Wish I could be what I know I am/This moment’s hijacked my plans,” Gaga sings on the deceptively upbeat “Fun Tonight.” (Its chorus: “I’m not having fun tonight.”)

“Chromatica” divides itself into three parts, using the interludes as demarcation. The first third houses many of the singles, including “Stupid Love,” an electro-disco stomper that raids Gaga’s own catalogue for inspiration, and “Rain on Me,” a collaboration with Ariana Grande that expertly melds their seemingly disparate musical sensibilities.

Part two serves up several of the album’s greatest tracks: “Sour Candy,” a collaboration with K-pop girl group Blackpink, who partly sing in their native Korean; the cyborgian funk exercise “911”; the claustrophobic, dysfunctional “Replay” (“Every single day, I dig a grave/Then I sit inside it/Wondering if I’ll behave”).

“Chromatica” doesn’t have a single slow song (“Ballads are illegal on Chromatica,” BloodPop tweeted), but none of the bendthe-knee imperial pop Gaga is known for, either. It’s the only Lady Gaga album in history that could stand to be more grandiose.

The album flags slightly in its back third, when its mildness starts to wear. “1000 Doves,” a circa-2002 Eurodance track heavy with religious symbolism, sounds like the walk-in music at a Sunday morning Hillsong service. On the joyous synth explosion “Sine From Above,” guest vocalist Elton John (Elton John!) seems like an afterthought. Twelve songwriters on this one, and nobody knew better. — The Washington Post