Earth is cancelled! Chromatica forever!

Lady Gaga – fresh from being crowned Popstar of the Century – has finally released her latest studio album (I don’t even know which number – do you count The Fame Monster? Do you count A Star Is Born’s soundtrack? Do you count that one with Tony Bennett?!), and WHAT A TREAT IT IS.

I’m always checking up on reviews of multimedia bits I’m excited about, so I’ve been having a field day this afternoon reading what The Experts have to say.

The good news is that most mainstream critics are full of praise – and in fact Chromatica has tied Gaga’s career-best score on review aggregator Metacritic, with a weighted mark of 78/100 across all professional critiques registered thus far. That’s exactly on-par with The Fame Monster and the A Star Is Born soundtrack.

For comparison, Joanne scored 67, Cheek To Cheek 64, Artpop 61, Born This Way 71 and The Fame 71.

Among the acclaim for the new album, inews kick us off with a lovely 5-star rating; saying: “It’s not loose, exactly, but it feels wild and uninhibited; not just Gaga’s reclamation of the dance floor, but a reminder of the healing, revelatory and revolutionary power of dance music.” Read the glowing write-up here.

NME have awarded four stars out of five, praising the return to dance-friendly pop and singling out the Elton duet Sine From Above for particular praise. Read that here. The Guardian have also given four stars; saying Gaga “explores buried trauma, mental illness and the complexities of fame on this return to form”. Read that one here.

Four stars are cautiously given out by the Irish Times (here), while Metro give four-and-a-half stars in a particularly interesting deep-dive; saying: “Lady Gaga understands pop music like no other, but sometimes she’s guilty of letting the art overshine the pop. With Chromatica, she both makes a comeback and an artistic re-birth.” Read it in full here.

The London Evening Standard dubs Chromatica “a non-stop pop rocket into space” as it too gives a four-star rating (here), while Clash award a pleasing score of 8/10 (here).

The AV club are complimentary but a tiiiiny bit more critical; giving a B grade and reasoning that the album “itself suffers from an identity crisis”. They conclude that “her choices can be puzzling, and not every song is a success, but that unpredictability is what makes her exciting and leaves us coming back for more.” Read that review here.

The Independent are part of the four star club: they note that “the more desperate the lyrics, the more the melody blossoms into life”. Read here.

What an album, what a woman.