After three years of proving she can sing, we eagerly awaited a return to her best – but the songwriting never lives up to the classic disco aspirations

Lady Gaga’s gradual descent towards middlebrow has been, well, disconcerting. Her last solo album, 2013’s ARTPOP, was more bluster than soul. The few great pop songs were sunk by baffling publicity stunts – was it the flying dress? The half-baked iPad app? The cancelled R. Kelly video? The empress had no clothes.

Her public performances in the three years since – singing jazz standards with Tony Bennett, her Sound of Music medley at the Oscars – have relied on the one thing that’ll never fail her: her voice. She sounded triumphant, but it was all so conservative. Why was one of the world’s most vital popstars so stuck in the past?

The first thing you notice about Perfect Illusion, the disco-rock lead single from her upcoming album, is that there’s zero pitch correction on her vocal. Gaga’s taken a page from Sia’s book, and amidst pop radio’s artificial perfection it’s a bold move. Gaga wants you to hear the blue notes, the cracks in her voice.

Unfortunately the cracks are all you hear.

Produced by Gaga with Mark Ronson, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Blood Pop, Perfect Illusion’s best moments are its most sparse: the pulsing verses, the guitar-and-vocals breakdown before the final chorus.

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But exactly 30 seconds in, the first chorus turns the volume up to 11 and the song never relents. There’s barely room to breathe, for the singer or the listener. When the song runs out of choruses less than two minutes in, it even resorts to the dreaded truck driver’s key change. Gaga belts the title over and over like a mantra but it never becomes any more profound. The real Perfect Illusion isn’t love; it’s a blank metaphor her voice tries and fails to imbue with meaning.

The song aspires to the heartbreak and triumph of a classic disco record. But Gaga lacks the grace of a true disco diva. Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Gloria Gaynor – their voices were smooth, not jagged. Nor is there any sense of camp, or a knowing wink, to defuse the tension – no, Gaga’s deathly serious. At its most transcendent, disco was about dancing joyfully through your tears. Perfect Illusion sounds more like heaving sobs, flailing about in search of a melody.

Lady Gaga has spent the last three years proving she can sing. But in her quest to overwhelm us with her vocal talent, she’s under-delivered with her songwriting.

Pop music exists in the present; you’re only as good as your last single. So bring on the next reinvention – the sooner the better.