Lady Gaga releases new song "Stupid Love" off new album 'Chromatica'

Lady Gaga has confirmed that her sixth album will be out this year, and today she released the first single from it, “Stupid Love.” It’s her first proper solo single since 2016’s Joanne and her first new song since 2018’s A Star Is Born soundtrack (home to the massive “Shallow”), and it finds her sorta returning to the loud, synthy pop of her early years, but in a new way. She made it with BloodPop, Tchami, and Max Martin, and here’s what she told Zane Lowe about that:

I’ve never worked with him, I’ve always sort of gone, I write my own music, I produce myself, I don’t need to work with Max, right? And I decided to stop being asshole, meet him at least, you know? […] Basically, I sang over a track that BloodPop made, who were in the studio, we sent over what I sang to Max, Max picked some parts out, sent it back to me, and then I wrote lyrics and used some of the melody that he chose that he sent back to me and I kind of spliced it all together and then I went to his studio, and sat down at a piano and I played Stupid Love on a piano with chords. And I looked at him and I said, that’s what I’ve got for you, and to me, this song can only stand on it’s two feet, even with a great track, if you can play it on a piano and it still sounds like a hit. And he was-he was like, I love it, get in the booth. I warmed up my voice, got in the booth, I sang it, and what you’re hearing on “Stupid Love” is what we did that day.

It’s pretty great if you ask me! Listen and watch the video below.

UPDATE (3/2): Gaga has officially announced that her new album is called Chromatica and due April 10 via Interscope. She discussed it in an interview with Zane Lowe — listen and read more below.

The symbol for Chromatica has a signwave in it, which is the mathematical symbol for sound, and it’s from what all sound is made from, and, for me, sound is what healed me in my life period, and it healed me again making this record, and that is really what Chromatica is all about. It’s about healing and it’s about bravery as well and it’s really like, when we talk about love I think it’s so important to include the fact that it requires a ton of bravery to love someone.

BloodPop® [who executive produced Chromatica with Lady Gaga] brought it up, and we talked about how Chromatica was essentially on its own when you first look at it, it seems to be about colors and all the different colors and also music is made of a chromatic scale, you know? So it’s all the colors, all the sounds, you know, so we, we’re talking about inclusivity and life and also a lot of what we see around us and what we’re experiencing is math, which is very much like music and and sound is math as well. So we talked about that, and then I sort of went back and I said, “OK, well, yeah, it’s inclusivity but it’s really a way of thinking,” you know, it’s not just, “Oh, Chromatica, we’re being inclusive with all the colors, all the people,” and when I say, “All the colors, all the people,” I mean way more than we could possibly fathom.

I think that we’re actually operating on a completely rudimentary level where we square things off into very simplified colors when actually we’re all extremely different in a vast variety of ways that stem from both, like, genetics as well as epigenetics, like, we’re all completely different and I thought OK, well maybe, Chromatica is a frame of mind. And that is my frame of mind, and I don’t know that I’ve ever made an album that wasn’t on Chromatica in some type of way, meaning like my frame of mind is always a part of my music, and this is just my way of kind of expressing, even in a both literal and abstract way, that, like, making music and putting it out into the world is my perspective on life, and it’s also my gift to the world in the best way that I can, and I think that everyone on any given day is doing the absolute best that they can do, and this is my perspective, and here it is, and it’s always been my perspective, but now I know that it was my perspective.