(Interscope)
After some noteworthy musical and cinematic misfires, Gaga gets back to her core themes of sex, sleaze and celebrity on an album that sounds not retro, but relevant

Lady Gaga’s single Abracadabra is enjoying its fifth consecutive week in the UK Top 10. You can imagine a collective sigh of relief chez Gaga: she has been experiencing what you might call a case of career sea sickness, in which unadulterated commercial triumphs have been followed by very public flops. In the credit column, there’s Die With a Smile, a power-ballad duet with Bruno Mars that went to No 1 in 28 countries and spent 10 weeks as the world’s biggest-selling single. (Released last August, it also appears on Mayhem.) In the debit, there was her starring role in the disastrous Joker: Folie à Deux, a film that was estimated to have lost Warner Brothers something in the region of $150m (£116m), and which seemed to take both the Gaga-heavy soundtrack and her own, jazz-based “companion album” Harlequin down with it. You might have expected the legions of Little Monsters (as her fans are known) to rally around the latter, but apparently not. Outside of a couple of remix collections, it was the lowest-selling Lady Gaga album to date and her second jazz album to noticeably underperform: a follow-up collection of duets with the late Tony Bennett, 2021’s Love for Sale, failed to replicate the success of its predecessor, Cheek to Cheek.

One theory is that Gaga’s eclecticism might have succeeded in confusing people. The fact that you never quite know what she’s going to throw out next – electronic dance-pop, soft rock, jazz, country, AOR – should be cause for celebration, but perhaps it has proved a bit much in a world dominated by streaming’s overload, where artists are advised to maintain a clear brand lest they get lost amid the sheer torrent of new music. Maybe what was needed was a bold restatement of Gaga’s original core values. That was precisely what Abracadabra, and indeed its predecessor, Disease, provided: big dirty synths; big noisy choruses; high-camp, fashion-forward videos and, in the case of Abracadabra, a hook apparently designed to remind listeners of the word-mangling intro to 2009’s Bad Romance.

Readers respond to a piece by Sam Dick about the letter his father wrote to the Guardian in 1998 in praise of his gay son

I was moved by Sam Dick’s article that detailed his coming out to his family and, in particular, the letter that his father wrote to the Guardian about their pride in and respect for him (A moment that changed me: I was 16, gay and bullied for it. Then my father wrote to the Guardian …, 5 March). Sam’s experiences were very familiar to me, in that they were a reminder of my brother coming out more than 20 years ago.

My brother is younger than me and, although our family home was a loving one, I guess that my brother will have viewed our dad and I as being very “male”. We both enjoyed our football, enjoyed socialising, and had groups of like-minded friends; my brother was the polar opposite. As a result, he was terrified of coming out.

Readers respond to an article by Nels Abbey on what constitutes Englishness or being British

I’m not sure that I entirely agree with Nels Abbey’s conclusion regarding what constitutes Englishness, although ethnicity is certainly one factor that is used by others to determine whether you pass that test (Dear Suella: I was born in London and raised in Oxfordshire. What do you reckon – can I be English?, 5 March). As someone who is white and of mixed first-generation Polish on my father’s side and English/Welsh extraction on my mother’s side, I have mixed feelings on this subject.

As a child, I initially had no doubt that I was English until one day in the 1970s when I was asked at school, during an important football World Cup qualifier, which team I supported. When I responded, “Poland”, I was informed by my classmates that I was therefore no longer English.

Levies on tourists and cruise ships considered by some local authorities in attempt to plug funding gaps

Council tax costs in Scotland will hit record levels next month after local authorities agreed to raise rates by up to 15%, with some planning new levies on tourists and cruise ships.

All of Scotland’s 32 local authorities have announced council tax increases from April of at least 6%, with the majority raising them by about 10%, after years of successive cuts to their grant funding.

• Matt Sherratt ‘keen to let them go again’ away to Scotland
• Darcy Graham returns for home side after concussion

Wales will field an unchanged XV for the first time in 66 Tests on Saturday when they take on Scotland at Murrayfield after Matt Sherratt stuck with the starting lineup that gave a scare to the Six Nations title favourites, Ireland, in the last round.

The interim head coach, Sherratt, said he was “keen to let them go again” and the game will mark the first time since 2019 that Wales have put out the same XV.