Plus there’s a “surprise” unnamed second project she’s working on whose details are still under wraps.
Lady Gaga attends the “Joker: Folie À Deux” photocall during the 81st Venice International Film Festival at Cipriani Hotel on Sept. 5, 2024 in Venice, Italy. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Start your engines Little Monsters because we now know when Lady Gaga‘s seventh album will descend from pop heaven. According to a new Vogue cover feature, LG7 — as yet untitled officially — is due out in February, with the untitled first single due out in October.
“There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure,” the singer told the magazine about the album. “And when I start to explore that pain it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio [Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La], I’m relaxed and I am able to face my demons and what’s remarkable is… that’s the music. I’m able to hear it back.”
The profile opens at Rubin’s famed studio in Malibu — just down the road from Gaga’s home — where Gaga recorded 2016’s Joanne, as well as some of the music for the 2018 soundtrack to her feature film debut, A Star Is Born. It reveals that Gaga has spent “the better part of 2024 here” working on both her new pop record and a second “surprise project” whose details have not yet been revealed.
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Additionally, the very public enigma of a star reveals that her fiancé, Michael Polansky — to whom she got engaged in April after a day of rock climbing — was the one who pushed her to return to her pop roots. “Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record. He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music,’” she said, with Polansky adding, “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to the joy of it. On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her; I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”
The writer then describes hearing a new, untitled, song from the upcoming album, writing that it is an “intense and ominous… old-school Gaga banger, unsettling but also buoyant.”
Earlier in the piece, Gaga noted that she’s feeling “so happy” and healthy these days, unlike during her Chromatica era. “That album was about an absolutely horrible time for me with my mental health,” she said. “I was in a really dark place. I struggled for, like, many years before that.” The album came out in Mary 2020, just months into the COVID-19 pandemic, when Little Monsters had to dance at home alone to the singles “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me.”
After fracturing her hip during the Born This Way Ball tour ten years earlier — setting off years of muscle pain due to fibromyalgia — the pain-free Chromatica outing was a revelation. “Michael and I did that tour together,” she said. “I did it pain-free! I haven’t smoked pot in years. I’ve, like, changed. A lot. I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery. And now, Michael and I are really excited to organize our lives — and our marriage — around our creative output as a couple.”
Which, she said in an allusion to the music industry, was “really different than, like, doing what other people want you to do.”
