Music reviews: Lady Gaga, Jason Isbell, and Astropical

‘Mayhem’ by Lady Gaga

Though Mayhem isn’t exactly a vintage effort, it’s “a welcome reminder of just how Gaga became Gaga,” said Chuck Arnold in the New York Post. The album, arriving months after her most recent detour into crooning jazz standards, “returns the 38-year-old diva to the dance-in-the-dark moves of her early career.” It even features callbacks to some of her biggest hits. The very first line evokes “Bad Romance,” while “Perfect Celebrity,” a standout new track, “plays like a synth-rock update of ‘Paparazzi.’” Gaga even named the euphoric party anthem “Zombieboy” after the tattooed, since-deceased muse from her 2011 video for “Born This Way.”

Since mid-2024, Gaga has been “experiencing a case of career sea sickness,” with notable commercial triumphs followed by flops like the Joker movie sequel Folie à Deux, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. In need of “a bold restatement of original core values,” she has delivered precisely that with the “big dirty synths” of this album’s first two solo singles. That none of these tracks sounds retro shows just how prescient Gaga once was. The pop world “has come round to her way of thinking.”

‘Foxes in the Snow’ by Jason Isbell

Jason Isbell has been making good records for years, yet “we’ve never heard him singing from such a broken, vulnerable place,” said Ryan Leas in NYMag.com. After a decade in which he put aside booze and recorded three Grammy-winning Americana albums, the Alabama native last year divorced Amanda Shires, the acclaimed fiddler who’d been so central to his appealing redemption story. But while recording a stripped-down acoustic set after a breakup continues a pop tradition, “Foxes is not a simple divorce record,” because it’s “equally populated by grief and new beginnings,” conveying “the messiness of moving on.”

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Recorded by Isbell in just five days, Foxes features “some of his most gut-wrenching songs in years,” said Ellen Johnson in Paste. “There are sober recollections of mistakes made and bridges burned,” but somehow gratitude outweighs anger. “Feel the pain and let it pass,” he sings. “Let love knock you on your ass.” Isbell never shies from speaking ugly truths, but he also “seeks out the beauty that’s always waiting in the shadows.” And the life tips he shares “leave room for the noblest things: mercy, growth, and redemption.”

‘Astropical’ by Astropical

Astropical “isn’t just a sparkling debut,” said Thom Jurek in AllMusic. The album, which brings together members of two revered rock en español bands, turns out to be “a remarkably hip work that can soundtrack spring and summer and all major life events.” When Li Saumet, frontwoman of Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo, asked Beto Montenegro, frontman of Venezuela’s Rawayana, if he’d be interested in collaborating, work on a single quickly expanded into the creation of an album that “melds African, tropical South American, Caribbean, and EDM rhythms with infectious melodies, soaring harmonies, and rousing choruses.”

While reggaeton, dembow, and dancehall have driven the recent boom in Latin pop, said Isabella Gomez Sarmiento in NPR.org, Astropical is a “euphoric” celebration of lesser-known Caribbean coastal genres such as champeta and psychedelic cumbia. On the “club-ready” opener, “Brinca (Acuario),” Montenegro’s “velvety, drawn-out vocals” collide with Saumet’s “piercing, fast-paced delivery,” and the contrast between their styles “becomes the album’s superpower,” a manifestation of Astropical’s aspirations for cross-cultural peace.