Lady Gaga continued to ramp up the excitement for her new single “Disease” with an unsettling short clip that appeared to offer a first look at the song’s music video.
The 11-second video, which Gaga posted on social media, comprises just one shot from the inside of a car as it pursues a young woman who is sprinting down a suburban street. There’s no clear look at the driver, only a strange silhouette that appears to show the wide brim of a hat and perhaps a piece of fabric jutting up from the arm. Soundtracking the video is a repeating piano line that splits the difference between sinister and solemn.
Gaga is set to release “Disease” this Friday, Oct. 25. Yesterday, she dropped the first teaser, a kind of scavenger hunt with a string of cryptic websites, which appeared to offer up possible lyrics: “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.”
“Disease” is expected to be the first proper offering from Gaga’s seventh studio album, which she first teased back in July. At the time, she posted a series of photos from inside a recording studio, writing, “Feel so grateful, heart is peaceful. It’s like meditation. I can’t wait for you to hear what I’m working on.”
In September, Gaga shared a few more details with Rolling Stone, saying the new record will be “nothing like” her last solo effort, 2020’s 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,” she said. “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.”
While it’s been four years since Chromatica, Gaga hasn’t stopped making music. In 2021, she released her second collaborative record with Tony Bennett, Love for Sale, and this past September she released Harlequin, a collection of jazz standards cut as a companion album for Joker: Folie à Deux.
