Mary Jane Holland

Thick, swirling synthesizers open this track like a curtain being drawn on something deliberately disorienting — there's a Dutch psychedelic rock influence that bleeds into the bones of the arrangement, guitars buried underneath layers of electronic texture in a way that makes the whole thing feel both nostalgic and alien. The tempo has a loping, almost narcotic quality, unhurried in a way that mirrors its own subject matter: an alter ego, a persona donned like a costume, an escape hatch into a version of yourself that exists outside of consequence. Gaga's vocal here is surprisingly playful, almost winking, with a looseness that contrasts sharply against her more theatrical performances — she sounds like someone who has genuinely located a pocket of freedom and is reporting back with a grin. The lyric moves through the logic of self-reinvention as chemical relief, the idea that personhood is mutable and sometimes that mutability is the only mercy available. It sits in a specific corner of the ARTPOP era where the maximalism briefly became permissive rather than overwhelming. Best experienced late at night, headphones in, when you've decided to be a slightly different version of yourself for the next few hours.