Lady Gaga's Road To 'Chromatica' Is A Revolving, Evolving Dance Floor
Back before Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta became Lady Gaga, she spent five nights a week dancing at dive bars and gay clubs across New York City. The rising BPMs soundtracked her last call epiphanies, and their hallmarks left a glitter-flecked imprint on her songwriting. Her musical framework was forged in her favorite Lower East Side haunts, and her debut album, 2008's The Fame, paired clever, cheeky wordplay with her beloved four-on-the-floor beats. She would take detours through other genres — '70s piano balladry, '80s bar band rock, jukebox country twang, Hollywood bravado and disco — but the dance floor was her dependable stomping ground from The Fame through 2013's Artpop.
At the time, Cheek to Cheek, 2014's album of jazz duets with Tony Bennett, felt like a way to flex a different kind of diva muscle. But after shelving her electronic inclinations while focusing on their lounge act, she leaned into the creative reset that gave her space from the sound that had come to define her. When she eventually returned to the studio to record her fifth album, Joanne, it was in pursuit of a completely new sonic palette, one that banked on guitars instead of the thudding pulse of '90s house. A glimmer of a dance hit came in 2017 when she released her stand-alone single "The Cure," but Gaga's synthetic impulses have mostly remained dormant for the last half decade — until Chromatica, her sixth studio album out May 29.
The dance-pop of may seem like a work of Little Monster fan-service, a batch of bangers and blockbuster music videos that recall her greatest hits. But is both a return to form and a full-circle moment, a complete revolution back to the music she not only loves to perform, but loves is where she's at right now: happy, hopeful and healing in her hard-won electro-pop utopia. Here's how she got there.
