Artpop Review

There is a devoted campaign to rehabilitate this record and it is half right. Applause is a great single and Gypsy is a proper stadium song that got buried. Venus and Sexxx Dreams show a producer's imagination, with synths and drum programming that are stranger than anything on her earlier albums. But the album has no shape. It swings from art theory to sex jokes to EDM drops without any thread joining them, the sequencing is arbitrary, and the writing is at its weakest, alternating between blunt provocation and pronouncements about art that do not survive being read aloud.

Do What U Want is now unplayable for reasons outside the music. Aura opens the record on a joke that lands badly. The ambition is real and the failure is genuine, not a case of the public missing the point. It sounds like an artist with unlimited resource and no editor at the exact moment she stopped being able to hear herself.