All of Lady Gagas Albums Ranked, From The Fame to Chromatica

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Years from now when cultural historians revisit and reevaluate the last decade in one expansive volume, women will dominate the chapters on pop music. It’s hard to imagine what the 2010s might have sounded like without the influence of Adele, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and, of course, Lady Gaga. They all had specific strengths, but more than any other pop artist of the last 10 years, male or female, Gaga embraced the chameleonic tradition that made David Bowie and Madonna iconic in previous eras and updated it to suit modern musical palates.

In the process, she became a pop star and an LGBTQ icon, beloved and respected by the masses, by critics and by her ride-or-die “Little Monster” stans. She scored hit singles, platinum albums and Grammys, and with her three Oscar nominations (including a best original song win for the “A Star Is Born” track “Shallow”), she even managed to achieve the Hollywood status that mostly eluded Bowie and Madonna before her. If she didn’t quite design the sound of the decade, Gaga, as much as any of the aforementioned female talents, helped define it.

At first it was easy to write her off as a novelty. But under the flash and costumery beat the heart and soul of a serious songwriter and musician. “Just Dance,” her chart-topping first single, announced the arrival of an exciting new talent but didn’t even hint at the versatility and genre-bending artistry to come.

It’s Gaga’s ability to reinvent her sound and consistently surprise that has secured her standing in the annals of pop this century. In her game-changing breakthrough acting role as Ally Maine in “A Star Is Born,” she retraced her own artistic trajectory in reverse: Earthy singer-songwriter evolves into glossy pop star. She co-wrote and performed most of the movie’s soundtrack and earned a best actress Oscar nomination. If the breadth of Gaga’s talent wasn’t obvious before “A Star Is Born,” there were few doubters after it opened in October of 2018.

And now she’s returned full-time to her original day job with “Chromatica,” her first studio album in four years. To mark the occasion, we’re looking back on all eight of her albums (including one EP and a soundtrack) and ranking them from good to essential. Where does the dance-pop of “Chromatica” land? Keep reading.

  • Cheek to Cheek (2014)

    Don’t be misled by its bottom ranking. Gaga is no slouch when it comes to tackling the Great American Songbook, and she more than holds her own with traditional-pop legend Tony Bennett. But it’s hard not to see this collaboration as Gaga’s grab for respectability without the pressure to sell millions after the commercial disappointment of “Artpop.” These songs already have been done to death by singers more skilled at singing them than Gaga. Instead of opting for the reverential and superfluous approach, what if Gaga had taken these familiar standards apart and reconstructed them in her own unique style, the way Annie Lennox did so masterfully that same year on “Nostalgia”? Then there would be no space for Bennett, but Gaga doesn’t really need him anyway.

  • A Star Is Born Soundtrack (2018)

    Despite the tendency of critics to undervalue conventional, this, the Gaga album with her most conventional singing and songwriting, tied with “The Fame Monster” for her best Metacritic rating up to the time of its release: 78. The best cuts are the country-rock duets with her “ASIB” co-star Bradley Cooper, which carefully unfold like intimate pieces of musical dialogue. Her solo showcases are less distinctive in the context of Gaga’s body of work, even if she does deliver them with all the confidence and bravado of “Bodyguard”-era Whitney Houston. Separated from the movie’s narrative, “Look What I Found” and “Before I Cry” sound like they’d be more at home on a Christina Aguilera or Kelly Clarkson album, and the purposely mindless pop of “Why Did You Do That?” lacks the sharpness and luster of even a throwaway Gaga B-side. Maybe that’s the point. Ultimately, these tracks are Ally Maine’s artistic statements, not Lady Gaga’s, and the fictional pop star just isn’t as fascinating and complicated as the real one.

  • The Fame (2008)

    Gaga masters the art of the grand, memorable entrance as she makes her own. On her 2008 debut album, she emerges a talent seemingly in full bloom. Her powerhouse voice already knows its way around an unshakable hook. The key changes and musical modulations of “Paparazzi” and “Poker Face” confirm her musical prowess a few tracks in, but the album’s overall production is very much a sound of the times. Gaga would hate this comparison, but Madonna’s debut album manages to take us right back to 1983 without sounding like a musical time capsule. Conversely, today “The Fame” has 2008 oozing from its pores. Charming as Gaga was out of the box, her debut is a tad too dated now to qualify as truly classic pop.

  • Chromatica (2020)

    Like Fiona Apple’s recent “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Gaga’s latest studio album could be subtitled “Music for Lockdown.” It’s a song cycle about chains, being bound by them and breaking free. Unlike Apple, Gaga isn’t taking any chances on dog barks and other obtuse found sounds freaking up the proceedings. “Chromatica” is almost defiantly commercial. The biggest surprise might be that there really aren’t any surprises. Aside from the art-poppy “Chromatica” interludes, all she wants to do is dance, and she offers a fairly middle-of-the-road retro club trip: The synth motif on “Free Woman” sounds like it was plucked right out of every gay disco in the ’90s, and “Sine from Above,” a duet with Elton John, wears shades of drum ‘n’ bass at the end. “Stupid Love,” “911” and “Sour Candy,” three of the best tracks, keep things interesting, but those who were initially drawn to Gaga’s penchant for offbeat might miss her meat-dress eccentricities. It sounds like she’s hung that up for good.

  • Artpop (2013)

    Gaga continues her quest to make millennial pop more respectable with her fourth release, even giving it a title that associates it with — gasp! — art. And where its predecessor “Born This Way” succeeds, so does “Artpop.” So what if it isn’t nearly as challenging or out-there musically as its title might lead us to expect? Her biggest risk was the R. Kelly duet “Do What U Want,” the album’s second single and her first real foray into R&B, but the track was expunged from “Artpop” after the sexual assault allegations against R. Kelly in the 2019 documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” sent his past (white) collaborators scrambling to erase him from their discographies. Still, considering what many of her pop peers were doing at the time, “Artpop” does indeed stretch the boundaries of the genre. Not every experiment works as well as “G.U.Y.” and “Sexxx Dreams,” and lyrically, it’s all pretty shallow (to quote the title of her future hit), but with the album-closing “Applause,” Gaga beautifully sums up her pop-star ethic. It ranks among her best singles and more than earns the cheers it craves.

  • The Fame Monster (2009)

    This is the album that cements Gaga’s starpower. Correction: the EP. The first extended play ever to be nominated for the album of the year Grammy (and Gaga’s second consecutive contender for the Recording Academy’s top prize), “The Fame Monster” clocks in at 34 minutes over eight tracks. Less an official follow-up to Gaga’s debut album than a placeholder to keep her momentum going, the EP was bundled with “The Fame” for a two-album deluxe edition. It’s more than a musical spinoff or abbreviated sequel, though. “The Fame Monster” builds on the promise of “The Fame,” offering a higher-tech affair with crisper hooks and more accomplished songwriting. “Bad Romance,” in particular, upstages everything that came before it. If “Monster” falters, it is in the sameness of its anthemic pop. Thank God for “Alejandro,” four and a half minutes of Latin-tinged gorgeousness and early proof that she could change her sound as thrillingly as her style.

  • Joanne (2016)

    At the time of its release, many critics categorized this as Gaga’s “country” album, but that wasn’t quite right. It’s an amalgamation of styles: country, singer-songwriter rock, folk, Stax soul, ’70s R&B, gospel, cabaret, spaghetti western music … everything but the sledgehammer dance pop that made her a star. She blends her musical influences so seamlessly —  most spectacularly on “Come to Mama” and the Florence Welch collaboration “Hey Girl” — that as an album, “Joanne” defies and transcends genre. Anyone familiar with Gaga’s early unplugged version of “You and I” from “Born This Way” knew she had this in her. This isn’t so much Gaga giving her sound an extreme makeover as it is her stripping away the gloss and glitter and offering as close a glimpse as we’ve gotten of Stefani Germanotta, the real, live woman behind the superstar.

  • Born This Way (2011)

    Despite her outlandish image, Gaga came across as a fairly mainstream pop artist on her first two releases. Her third, though, was where she started to transfer the daring of her visual presentation to her music. Despite accusations that the title track is a “reductive” rewrite of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” “Born This Way” sounds unlike anything anyone else was doing at the time. Gaga seamlessly merges post-modern electro sounds with the bombast of ’80s stadium pop, dance-metal and power balladry. The singles “Born This Way” and “Judas” remain undeniable, but even the tracks some might be tempted to dismiss as filler, like “Government Hooker” and “Heavy Metal Lover,” hold up. Though not quite a magnum opus, this is Gaga’s most essential album. She isn’t on the edge of glory, she’s basking in it.

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