Love is a haunting in Lady Gaga’s new single Disease. Not in a wistful, melancholic way but the kind of supernatural-feeling sickness that might have you calling for a priest, rather than a doctor. It’s full force return to her pop roots, coming as a high gothic blast that’s perfect for spooky season.
Gaga takes on the role of both spiritual and medical saviour in Disease, promising she can free you from the cold sweats and screams that plague your sleep. Love as a sickness has been a motif for the artist, most famously in her 2009 single Bad Romance from The Fame Monster album. In Disease, your mortal soul seems just as much at risk as your health.
It may have been four years since she’s released a studio album, but Gaga very much still has her finger on the pulse of pop bangers, and the vocal range to back it up. Her octave slide, put to such effective use in Judas on her 2011 album Born This Way is back, ramping up the religious themes.
Catholicism is in vogue currently, but Gaga has always tangled with the Church in her artistic output. Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, she was raised in the Catholic faith and is still religious. She’s spoken about her return to making music being a tussle with her demons – is Disease an exorcism?
Invoking love as demonic possession gives Gaga an opportunity to mess around in her lower register. Strangled squawks and guttural utterings borrow from black metal vocal techniques to create an ominous soundscape. It’s a vocal dance with the satanic that makes you wonder what might come out if you played the tape backwards.
Gaga has spoken of her love of classic horror movies, and as the harbinger of her upcoming seventh album (as yet unnamed beyond the moniker LG7) Disease suggests she’s going to be digging deeper into this genre rich with metaphor and gore.
A master of reinvention, Gaga has donned talon-like nails and the wet dark hair of a drowned woman for the single’s promotional material. There’s no music video - yet - but the lyric video is straight out of The Ring. Drenched in a sickly green glow, lyrics flash up on a retro television set disrupted by static pulsing to the beat.
This is a tune that will stay with you like a curse, in a good way. Disease has got wicked case of the earworms, burrowing their way into your brain after just one listen. If the nymphomaniac parasites from David Cronenburg’s 1975 body horror Shivers had pursued a musical career, this would be their signature song.
The sainted is also in the room. Angelic choral lines float through the backing track. The object of her affection/infection/possession has their “eyes roll back in ecstasy”. Like Bernini’s climactic altarpiece of Saint Teresa receiving a vision of God, sex and death, pleasure and suffering are eternally intertwined.
Disease is a hit, and it’s unlikely we’ll be recovering before her new album finally drops in February 2025.
