Three years after her third solo studio album, Artpop, topped the charts, Lady Gaga is back with her newest record, Joanne, set to be released by Interscope Records on October 21, 2016.
Anchoring the shapeshifting artist's latest musical effort is the album's first single, "Perfect Illusion," a song about love and illusion ("It wasn't love, it was a perfect illusion" she sings in the chorus)—a topic that many assume to be about Gaga's ex fiancé, Taylor Kinney.
After releasing the audio track last week, Gaga debuted the song's video on Twitter last night. Directed by Ruth Hogben—who, in addition to being the creative director behind the album's campaign and shooting the single's cover, has worked on Gaga's past Monster Ball tour—the video features lots of short shorts, a controversially un-controversial "plain" look for Gaga and plenty of dancing with a microphone in hand. Take a look:
Joanne, which follows Gaga's 2014 Cheek to Cheek album, a collaboration with Tony Bennett (whom she also went on tour with), is a tribute to Gaga's father's late sister, Joanne Germanotta (the artist's own middle name is Joanne as well), who passed away from lupus at 19.
"She is the woman of my past, helping me bring more of my honest-woman self to the future," Gaga told Beats 1 in a phone interview.
The 11-track album, which features Joanne's handwriting on its back cover and family mementos inside of the packaging, follows "an Italian American girl, a city girl, venturing out into new territory" said Gaga, seemingly describing her own artistic path.
What other tracks can we expect? "John Wayne" which is "a song about my incessant need to run after wild men, featuring guitars from Josh Homme [of Queens of the Stone Age]" and "Sinner's Prayer," which Gaga described as "about singing to a man, telling him 'Look, I don't want to break the heart of any other man but you, but I know I'm a sinner.'"