Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars fans occupy similar stations: It’s been a minute since the last big drop — a full length collaboration with another artist whose skills tugged the pop star away from the usual sonic vectors — and longer still since a collection of new songs embodied the trademark sound, her bustling electronics and his nondenominational funk. Monsters anticipating the proper follow-up to 2020’s celestial dance-pop odyssey Chromatica savored 2021’s Love for Sale, a second batch of duets of jazz standards with the late Tony Bennett (after 2014’s Cheek to Cheek), in the interim; the wait to see how Bruno matches the international reach of 2016’s New Jack Swing and G-funk time capsule “24K Magic†was punctuated by 2021’s An Evening With Silk Sonic, the chart-topping debut with fellow West Coast jack-of-all-trades Anderson .Paak, whose pimpish vocal tone tilted the mercurial Mars’s time-displaced pop-historian instincts toward 1970s beggin’ music. With Gaga weeks out from a Joker: Folie à Deux press tour, and Mars heading into his annual residency at the Park MGM in Vegas, it’s no surprise that “Die With a Smile,†the pair’s first duet, isn’t a major musical to-do. It eschews the upbeat tempos and dance routines, instead foregrounding triumphant vocal harmonies fighting off an air of imminent world catastrophe instead.
While the Johnny Cash Show aesthetic-apparent in the music video and at the live premiere at L.A.’s newly rechristened Intuit Dome tap into the western airs percolating in a year run by Morgan Wallen, Beyoncé, Shaboozey, and Post Malone releases (at least, between fresh Tortured Poets deluxe editions), “Die With a Smile†doesn’t take quite the same plunge. It’s a hefty ballad benefitting from a colorful cast of characters. Boomer-whisperer Andrew Watt — who has produced Elton John, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, and the Stones but also big Posty and Miley Cyrus albums — is credited alongside Silk Sonic co-producer D’Mile and 24K Magic collaborator (and mercenary pop-star pen) James Fauntleroy. Turning Gaga loose on a love song about sky-high emotional stakes is lugging an AR-15 to a pistol duel. She’s is in her comfort zone belting it out like she does here, while the beefy rhythm section carries the “Grenade†man’s shoutier tendencies without crunching up the track too much. (Though you have to imagine Watt would love it if this thing went full “Live and Let Die,†and leaned more into the tension between hushed resolute verse and booming, authoritative refrain.)
Just as Silk Sonic saw two versatile artists locking into a very specific loadout of historical reference points, “Smile†identifies doomerism, countrypolitan stye, and the timeless tug of the adult-contemporary torch song as major themes alongside Amazon Prime’s Emmy-nominated Fallout, the Tony-winning Stereophonic, and mega-viral singer Chappell Roan. It’s a smart, albeit safe, choice for pop heavyweights who knock this kind of performance out of the park rain or shine, and it’s difficult to fixate on the livelier, quirkier song the duo might be delivering in an alternate universe when interlocking vocal lines shoot up into the stratosphere. (To be fair, there are probably just as many Earth variants where the theatrics of these two result in something overbearing.) It’s hard to say what “Smile†portends — whether is LG7 imminent or Park MGM co-workers are just clique-ing up for a group project — but it is nice to see them tiptoeing around the Zeitgeist.