Pop stars like Lady Gaga are bringing back the feel-good party vibes of the late 2000s and early 2010s, but how do these throwbacks hold up?

American pop star Lady Gaga lands in Singapore this week, fortified by the facade of a neoclassical opera house, a characteristically theatrical wardrobe and, if you have been paying attention to online chatter, some reheated nachos, apparently.

- Cherie Lok

Of course, she does not actually have a warmed-over bowl of chips affixed to her person. The nachos, in this case, refer to her music. In particular, the songs from her latest album, Mayhem (2025), which will be on full blast when she takes the stage four times at the National Stadium, starting on May 18.

Tracks such as Abracadabra, whose gibberish chorus recalls the bombastic extravagance of her 2009 hit Bad Romance and Garden Of Eden, in which she bids the listener "meet me on the floor," immediately struck fans as throwbacks to an earlier time, one when the proverbial DJ ruled the waves, and when a younger, edgier Gaga held the music industry in the palm of her leather-gloved hand.

"She really reheated her own nachos!!" exclaimed one listener on X.

For the uninitiated, to reheat one's nachos is to draw inspiration from past work. It is somewhat trimmed with reproach—in the same way that reanimated nachos taste stale, music that references a bygone trend can feel derivative or uninspired.

Gaga, however, wears the description with pride, telling Entertainment Weekly in March: "I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them, and I'm proud of them."

She is not the only one trying to inject old sounds into a new world in which the clubs are quieter, the "stans" (read: devoted fans) more ruthless and their vernacular harder to parse.

Fellow American singer-songwriter Kesha is back with forthcoming album Period (2025), and as its lead single Joyride goes, she is "just looking for a good time tonight".

Pitbull, too, has teamed up once again with Spanish dance pop icon Enrique Iglesias—with whom he previously worked on tracks such as