Doctor Lady Gaga is almost ready to see her next batch of patients. “Disease,” the first single from the musician’s forthcoming pop album, is expected to arrive on Friday, Oct. 25 after she teased the record through a cryptic website and playlist.
Gaga sent her fans on something of a scavenger hunt for clues about the single. On the website gagadisease.com, the words “I could play the doctor” glitch against a black screen. The site is paired with another URL, icouldplaythedoctor.com, which replicates the visual effects of the first site with the words “I can cure your disease.” When that phrase is used as the URL, it redirects to another page that reads: “If you were a sinner.”
Following the pattern, the teased lyrics read: “I could play the doctor/I can cure your disease/If you were a sinner/I could make you believe/Lay you don’t like 1, 2, 3/Eyes roll back in ecstasy/I can smell your sickness/I can cure ya/Cure your disease.” The final page features the “Disease” title and an accompanying Oct. 25 release date.
Gaga kicked off the countdown for the single in September when she announced plans to release her seventh album, currently untitled, in February. At the time, she shared that the first single from the project would arrive in October. The news came by way of an interview with Vogue, in which she detailed the origins of her sonic return-to-form. As it turns out, it traces back to her fiancé Michael Polansky.
“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,’” she said. Polansky, who had this realization while watching Gaga on the Chromatica Ball tour, added: “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to 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.”
Gaga recorded her seventh album at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La recording studio in Malibu. Looking back on her 2020 album Chromatica, she shared: “That album was about an absolutely horrible time for me with my mental health. I was in a really dark place.” The new album, on the other hand, “in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery.”
In September, Gaga told Rolling Stone: “The pop album is nothing like Chromatica. It’s a completely different record. I don’t know that I’m even ready to talk about it yet, but I recognize that it’s coming out soon, and I will. What I would say is, it’s all for me. It’s meant to be ingested as a time in my life. And I’m also really excited about this idea that I don’t have to adhere to an era if I don’t want to. I can have a few going at once. That feels unhinged [laughs] and more like me or Harley. Or whoever.”
