Lady Gaga Graces The Cover of Vogue & Announces New Album

Lady Gaga is gracing the cover of Vogue's October US issue. The artist announced the news with a new photoshoot and a lengthy interview, where she revealed the release month of her new untitled album, discussed her role in “Joker: Folie à Deux,” and spoke openly for the first time about her relationship with her fiancé, Michael Polansky.

You can read quotes from the interview below.

Talking about her new album:

  “There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure,” she says, “and when I start to explore that pain, it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio, 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.”

In a following statement, Vogue revealed that Lady Gaga’s new album will be released in February 2025, with the first single expected in October 2023.

Talking about her love for her peers:

Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish. “I mean, I really love them. I go on the internet and, like, cry. And I love Taylor Swift too. And Kesha. I watch it all, and I’m like: Yup. Go! Just Go.” Here, her voice cracks and her eyes well up with tears. “I’m not only cheering them on, I want them to know that my heart is in it with them. And I want them all to feel really happy.”

Talking about how she met her fiancé:

“My mom met him, and she said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’ and I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’ I could never have imagined that my mom…found the most perfect person for me?” Flash forward to December 2019: Parker’s 40th birthday party at his house in Los Angeles where Stevie Nicks performed. “I got invited, and I said, ‘I wonder if Michael is going to be there,’ and my mom said yes, and so I went to the party, and I kept asking for him, and he finally came over to me, and we talked for three hours. We had the most amazing conversation.” Polansky tells me that he didn’t make it three steps into the party before someone told him that Lady Gaga was looking for him.

About the difficulties with her previous album:

“I think what I want my fans to know is that I’m just, like, so happy. I’m healthy. I feel like the last time they heard from me—in this way—was Chromatica, and that album was about an absolutely horrible time for me with my mental health. I was in a really dark place. I struggled for, like, many years before that. But everything started to change. Because I had a real friend who saw the ways in which I was unhappy and why. And he wasn’t afraid to truly hold my hand. And get to know me. On a very deep level.”

Talking about the waltz she wrote for “Joker: Folie à Deux”:

“I wrote a waltz for the movie,” says Gaga. “And I had a live piano player, Alex Smith, whom I asked to be with me for my scenes. There are moments in the film where I’m playing an adult woman who sings like a little girl. And she’s moving through the world with this kind of immaturity, which I thought was interesting.”

On how she worked on her role of Harley Quinn:

“Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture. I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside—for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet?”

Her voice cracks again, and she takes a moment. “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way? And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”

How her fiancé convinced her to make a new pop record:

“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.’” Says Polansky: “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean into 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.”

On how she treats Lady Gaga as a “persona”:

“Man.” She shakes her head. “That’s a big question.” She takes a deep breath. “You know it’s not a persona. It’s not. I am all of these things. The person that I am when I’m onstage in front of 85,000 people? That is also me. That’s like one of the freedoms of my relationship with Michael. It feels really nice to have someone value you whether there’s 85,000 people watching or…the dogs. To see the whole you. And Lady Gaga is the whole me.”

“There was a time in my career when I…. Look….”—she cocks an eyebrow and slips into a self-mocking tone—“where I spoke in an accent in interviews or told lies, but I was performing. Now, it’s a much more palatable mixture of authenticity and imagination. I feel like the world, to a fault, operates in these binaries: You’re either real or you’re fake; you’re authentic or you’re shallow. But for me, I played a lot with artifice. I was fascinated with artifice, really, truly fascinated with it as an artistic tool. I still am. But my relationship to myself as an artist now is more empowered: This is me. This. Is. Me. It’s too complicated to split yourself in two and have to turn it off and on. It’s so much more empowering to be like, I’m a woman, and I’m super complex.”

You can read the full interview here.