“Stupid Love”

Lady Gaga has remained one of the biggest pop stars on the planet without actually making much pop music. She abandoned her synths and donned her best cowgirl drag for 2016’s rootsy Joanne, and while she buried a few in-character bangers deep in the soundtrack for A Star Is Born, that movie’s enduring hits were classic power ballads that would’ve sounded just as comfortable in 1978 as in 2018. “Stupid Love,” her new single, is her much-ballyhooed return to pop-as-genre. It’s “classic Gaga,” that imperial phase at the end of the ’00s when the only thing bigger than her hits were the music videos and conceptual art pieces surrounding them.

The song gestures toward that era without achieving the same kind of grandeur. Those big-budget mini-films were often accompanied by music that was just as audacious; the bulletproof hooks spread throughout The Fame Monster and Born This Way were coated in hair metal grease and industrial grime. If the brawny, shiny disco of “Stupid Love” sounds like anything in her catalog, it’s a sped-up version of “Do What U Want,” a song mostly erased from the public record because of its prominent R. Kelly feature. The video’s embrace of late-’90s JRPG energy pales in ambition and scale compared to “Bad Romance” or “Telephone.”

And yet it still feels like “Stupid Love” is filling a void in our downcast, anxious, genre-fluid landscape: The only other artist working in this mode is Dua Lipa, whose Future Nostalgia singles—big, bright, and heart-on-sleeve—have pushed her into a new echelon of pop stardom. There’s an appetite for this kind of unapologetically exuberant sound, one evidenced by the communal frenzy for the leaked version of this song earlier this year that earned a tongue-in-cheek reprimand from Gaga herself. “Stupid Love” may not reposition her at pop’s bleeding edge, but it captures just enough of the goofy, indomitable spirit that made her so refreshing in the first place.