WORTH A LOOK?: ***1/2

Next month is a big 1 for Lady Gaga with the release of the film in which she stars with Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix – Joker: Folie à Deux – and the launch of the 1st single from her upcoming album currently known as LG7 and due February 2025.

• Read on for reasons including everything we know about LG7

This single is not expected to feature and is soft rock with the emotional style of a pop and soul ballad boasting writer/producer credits for both Gaga and Mars with a rather saccharine chorus of: ‘If the world was ending I’d wanna be next to you, If the party was over and our time on Earth was through, I’d wanna hold you just for a while and Die With A Smile.’

It’s already topped the charts in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Norway and Singapore while going top 10 in many others including the US and UK and serves very much to whet the appetite for what we are about to receive.

We should, of course declare an interest at this point: when we launched monstagigz in July 2015 we very much took inspiration from the self-titled ‘mother monster’ and since then Lady Gaga has gone on to become a multiple monsta winner and become a far bigger movie star than we ever could have imagined.

Vogue reports via Billboard that Gaga has spent ‘the better part of 2024 here’ – Rick Rubin’s Malibu studio – working on both her new pop record and a second ‘surprise project’ whose details have not yet been revealed.

In a press release, Gaga said: ‘Bruno and I have a lot of mutual respect for each other and were talking about collaborating.’ She revealed that the collaboration materialized while she was recording her upcoming studio album in Malibu. At one night, after a long day, Mars invited Gaga to his studio to listen to music he had been working on and presented the track to her. At this point, she was ‘blown away’ when she heard what he was working on. The duo finished writing and recording the song on the same night. Gaga described Mars’ talent as ‘beyond explanation’ and ‘next level’, while Mars added that Gaga made the song ‘magical’.

Lady Gaga’s Olympics opening ceremony in Paris (see above) will be hard to top as spectacle but we’ve every confidence that mother monsta can do it.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Lady Gaga Tickets
• Have you seen a Lady Gaga show before and what do you think of this song? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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