5 Things We Want From Lady Gaga’s Next Studio Album: Critic’s Take

Each time she releases a new album, Gaga proves that she is a master of creating distinct musical eras. Artpop incorporated a much heavier EDM sound than her past works; Joanne heralded the singer’s less-beloved country switch-up; she’s even given us two albums’ worth of jazz standards. Thanks to this trend, Little Monsters have grown accustomed to calling for an “[insert genre here] album” for LG7. Some say they want to see the LP embrace a hard rock sound, while others have hoped for a pure disco album from Mother Monster.

But why limit Gaga? On her singular masterpiece Born This Way, the genres she employed on each track were entirely dependent on the emotional undercurrent of what she wrote. Sure, let Gaga do rock, and disco, and industrial techno, and anything else that she wants to — as long as the genre fits the overall of the song she’s singing, there should be no limit to the sonic landscape of LG7.

Lady Gaga is selective when it comes to featured slots on her projects — since she doesn’t do that many collaborations, the star goes out of her way to make them count when she does. Some of her biggest hits (“Shallow,” “Telephone” and “Rain on Me,” to name a few) came from Gaga’s choice of a proper collaborator. So on LG7, we’re hoping to see Gaga keep up her hot streak with another culture-breaking collaboration.

Our pitch? If Gaga continues to lean in the dark-pop direction she teased in Paris, then she should tap Kesha for a feature that’s been years in the making. After the release of her criminally underrated 2023 album Gag Order, Kesha is officially an independent artist again. Her latest single “Joyride,” along with the entirety of Gag Order, showed that Kesha is ready to play with her sound and take some creative risks — who better to help facilitate that process than Lady Gaga?

Part of what made Chromatica stand out so boldly in 2020 was its stark contrast to our lived reality at the time — while the world felt bleak and colorless in the early days of the pandemic, Gaga’s album provided vibrant escapism with its dance-pop fervor. While we love what Gaga accomplished on Chromatica, we’d like to see the “Stupid Love” singer dive deeper into a darker sound. When you listen back on a project like The Fame Monster, it’s fascinating to hear Gaga blend rich pop melodies with eerie, macabre themes — a feeling we think has been missing for too long from some of Gaga’s latest work.

Despite her reputation as pop music’s resident shapeshifter, Gaga has kept a relatively close-knit stable of producers around her since her debut in 2008. Working frequently with artists like RedOne, DJ White Shadow, Mark Ronson and BloodPop, Gaga has found a group of producers who understand her work — and while we don’t think she should abandon that team altogether, it would be nice to hear another producer’s take. 

There are already rumors swirling that Gaga may have worked with techno artist Gesaffelstein on LG7, which is as fitting a pairing as we can imagine for an industrial-inspired sound. If she wants to truly shake things up, though, we would love to see Gaga bring in some of the artists behind her Dawn of Chromatica remix album — LSDXOXO, Arca, A.G. Cook and others — and incorporate their experimental flair into LG7. 

For all the talk of change here, there is one thing we hope stays universally the same with Gaga’s next album: her love of the eccentric. From the very outset of her career, Gaga got (and stayed) ahead by focusing on the concept of non-conformity itself. She played with meta-narratives about the performance of fame (a feat modern artists would go on to replicate in their own style more than a decade later); she dedicated her work to outcasts, weirdos and “Monsters” alike; and she allowed herself to make music not defined by trends, but by what actually interested her.

If there is anything we can hope for in Gaga’s seventh studio album, it’s the simple plea that she stays true to the inherent peculiarity that has made her the singular pop icon that she is.