After a run of power ballads and jazz standards – plus the mega-flop Joker sequel – this synthpop single is a reminder of the Gaga of old, while still fitting into today’s Brat eraThus far, 2024 has proved a decidedly mixed bag for Lady Gaga. On the plus side, her duet with Bruno Mars, Die With a Smile was a huge global hit: nine weeks after its release, it is still resident in the UK Top 3 and is the second most-streamed song in the world on Spotify. But then there was the debacle of Joker: Folie à Deux, and her accompanying album Harlequin was released to a very muted critical and commercial response. Gaga has done an impressive job of carrying her audience along with her throughout an eclectic approach to pop in which arty synthpop coexists alongside stadium-sized soft-rock, country-infused Americana and vocal jazz – but she seemed finally to have lost them: a third album of standards, this time without her late duet partner Tony Bennett, and allied to one of the year’s biggest box office bombs, apparently proved a step too far.Perhaps she can rectify things with Disease, a song that that ignores the fact that her biggest successes in recent years have been power ballads – not just Die With a Smile but the 10m-selling Shallow – and returns her to old-fashioned Gaga territory. Certainly, her stans seem to think she can. Within hours of the single appearing, one of them had worked up such a froth they posted a 1,500-word online essay comparing its lyrics to Sylvia Plath, Baudelaire and the sonnets of John Donne, which even those impressed with the sex