On a recent episode of The Breakdown, Lady Gaga told Rolling Stone that her latest single “Disease” marked the beginning of her forthcoming studio album, known for now as LG7. And while the single, released in October, served as the official lead single for the record, it was “Die With a Smile” — her summer collaboration with Bruno Mars — that marked the true start of the era.
“It’s a huge part of my album,” Gaga told the L.A. Times about the single, which is nominated for Song of the Year at the 2025 Grammy Awards. “Die With a Smile” emerged during a late-night studio session with Mars, who was already toying around with the general idea of the record. “I sat down at the piano and was like, ‘OK, Bruno, show me the chords,’” Gaga recalled. “I don’t think he knew how much of a musician I was.”
LG7, which is expected to arrive in February, leans deeply into her deep-rooted musicianship as she makes a sharp pivot back to more traditionally structured pop songs. “The record is full of my love of music — so many different genres, so many different styles, so many different dreams,” Gaga said. “It leaps around genre in a way that’s almost corrupt. And it ends with love. That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find peace with love.”
Gaga described some of the thematic threads across the album as being similar to a “recollection of all these bad decisions that I made in my life,” but noted that it “ends in this very happy place.” Beyond “Disease” and “Die With a Smile,” the musician has already started to conceptualize the defining visual moments for the album — namely, her upcoming headlining performance at Coachella 2025.
“Music festivals to me are part of the community of music,” she said. Gaga performed at Coachella in 2017 after Beyoncé pulled out of her appearance, but the last-minute nature of the fill-in meant her first headlining set wasn’t all it could have been. She only had two weeks to prepare and “didn’t have the time to totally do what I really wanted to do.”
“I really wanted to be there for music fans, and at the time there was all this excitement to be able to film bits of A Star Is Born at Coachella,” she explained. “So I did it, and I loved it. But you know when you have a vision in your mind of how you want to do something? It’s time to make it happen … I don’t think there’s anything that’s affected me as deeply in my life as live music. There’s something for me that’s religion about it.”
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