#electroclash

#electroclash

Last weekend I was standing in line for some Fashion Week sale that I didn't even get into trying to figure out Dorian Electra's new industrial-strength electroclash track "Shutting Up." Why do I feel like I listened to this song obsessively from 2009-2011 and never again since? Why am I scrolling all the way back to I Created Disco-era Calvin Harris right now?

For a pair that specialize in giddy, girly EDM and brainrot electroclash-think Crystal Castles and 100 gecs by way of Nicki Minaj's "Starships" and Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus-meeting on Minecraft is perhaps the only logical origin story. And the best tracks on Beautiful Disaster, the duo's new mixtape, evoke the same feeling as the online realm where they first found each other: neuron-frying yet ecstatic and all-consuming.

On her sixth album, pop's queen of the dramatic reinvention did something more shocking than meat dresses and humanoid motorbikes: Lady Gaga looked back. Unlike the smooth tech-house flavour of its predecessor Chromatica, and diametrically opposed to the dinner jazz of her work with Tony Bennett, on Mayhem she returned to the operatic electroclash that powered her first two albums. There are synths that sound like a Dyson on its last legs.