Chromatica

Chromatica
Studio album by Lady Gaga
Released	May 29, 2020 (2020-05-29)
Recorded	2017–2020
Studio	Electric Lady Studios (New York City) Utility Muffin Research Kitchen (Hollywood Hills)
Label	Streamline Interscope
Producer	Axwell BloodPop Boys Noize BURNS Madeon Skrillex Tchami
Lady Gaga chronology
A Star Is Born (2018) Chromatica (2020)
Lady Gaga studio album chronology
Joanne (2016) Chromatica (2020)
Singles from Chromatica
"Stupid Love" Released: February 28, 2020 "Rain on Me" Released: May 22, 2020

Chromatica is the upcoming sixth studio album by American singer Lady Gaga. Originally scheduled for April 10, 2020, the album's release was delayed for seven weeks to May 29, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Chromatica will serve as a follow-up to Gaga's fifth studio album, Joanne (2016).

"Stupid Love" was released as the album's lead single on February 28, 2020, and reached number five in the United States. "Rain on Me" was released as the second single on May 22, 2020.

Background

In press interviews after it was announced she would embark on one final performance of her 2016 Dive Bar Tour, Gaga hinted new music would be performed and released during the new leg's stop. However, the Dive Bar Tour performance was later postponed indefinitely due to scheduling conflicts. Later, Gaga hinted the release of new music during the globe-crossing Joanne World Tour, however it was later revealed by Gaga in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that due to the constraints of the tour production, specifically the strictly-scheduled synchronization of its various technologies with the performances, there most likely will not be any new material performed on the Joanne World Tour, let alone any deviation from the structure of the show itself. It was also revealed in the same interview that production had begun on the follow up to Joanne, with Gaga offering that the album was still in the initial writing stage.

Writing and recording

In the first seven months of 2018, Gaga was seen at various recording studios in and around Los Angeles and New York City. The earlier recording sessions have been attributed to post-production work for the soundtrack to Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born, a remake of the 1937 film of the same name in which she has top billing. The later recording sessions have mostly been attributed to further production for Chromatica. Producer BloodPop, who had co-produced every song on the standard edition of Gaga's previous studio album Joanne (2016), shared on various social media platforms that he and Gaga had been recording at the singer's Malibu estate with German electronic music producer Boys Noize. BloodPop continued to post similar updates through the entirety of 2019 and January 2020, indicating production had continued for nearly three years. In July 2018, experimental electronic music producer Sophie confirmed that she had contributed production work for the upcoming project but was unaware if her collaboration would make the final cut.

In an interview with Beats 1's Zane Lowe, Gaga confirmed the album will be a dance record, saying "We are definitely dancing… I put all my heart, all my pain, all my messages from the other realm that I hear of… what they tell me to tell the world and I put it into music that I believe to be so fun and you know, energetically really pure. I want people to dance and feel happy. I would like to put out music that a big chunk of the world will hear, and it will become a part of their daily lives and make them happy every single day." She divulged how her intuition had evolved since the production of her last album, especially with the "real" and "honest" nature of this record's production virtually halting her inclination to second guess her creative output. Gaga also went into great detail about how the collaborative process of creating the album helped her overcome her internal struggles:

We made a lot of the record in my studio house. So I have a house where it's Frank Zappa's old studio, it's a live room, it's a big studio, it's beautiful. And I would be upstairs on the porch, outside the kitchen, and Bloodpop would come up and he'd go, 'Okay, come on, that's enough, off the porch,' and I would cry and I would say, 'I'm miserable, I'm sad, I’m depressed,' and he'd go, 'I know, and we're gonna go make some music now. And then I'd go downstairs and I would write. This album is such a display of not only how you can reframe the way that you view the world, but I promise and I hope, that the love that was around me in the process of making this album is something that other people feel, that they know that artistically, like, you know how producers are, if one guy’s working on it, or one girl’s working on it, they don’t want anyone else to work on it, they don’t wanna share, they, everybody gets cocky, there was none of that. These records got passed around to so many different people, there were so many different iterations of these songs because we all wanted it to be perfect and literally nobody cared who put their fingerprints on it, as long as it was the dopest thing that we could give to the world and that it was meaningful, authentic, and completely me.

In an interview with Paper released in March 2020, Gaga talked at length about numerous topics, including the recording process for Chromatica, and confirmed that BloodPop was the "center" and her "nucleus" of production while creating the album and that he had a hand in the creation of every track. It was also confirmed in the same interview that Gaga worked with a wide array of producers and musicians, such as Burns, Axwell of Swedish House Mafia, Tchami, Benjamin Rice, and Rami Yacoub, to create an album described as an "electronic tapestry” by the interviewer. In discussing the large collaborative atmosphere that enveloped the album's production, she said, "It's easy to go into a computer and find a cool loop, but the producers I work with don't work this way. When they're inspired, they embroider things."

Gaga collaborated with Ariana Grande on the track "Rain on Me".

Gaga disclosed that she had collaborated with a "fellow female pop star who [had similarly experienced] immense trauma while in the public eye" and went into depth about the genesis of their song, which she describes as a "celebration of all the tears": "I sat with her and we talked about our lives. It's two women having a conversation about how to keep going and how to be grateful for what you do." The song was later revealed to be titled "Rain on Me", a collaboration with American singer Ariana Grande. In the same interview, she also teased songs "911" dealing with her antipsychotic medication and "Free Woman" who answers what it means "to be a free woman [in 2020]". Gaga talked about the origin of the latter song, saying it "came from thinking on some days I was going to die. I was like, 'I'm going to die soon, so I better say something important.' Now I listen to it and know that I'm going to live." The song tackles her need to be with someone "in order to survive" while trying to be a free woman, a topic she discusses in the lyrics "I'm not nothing without a steady hand" as well as in her 2011 Born this Way song "Scheiße".

On April 23, 2020, BloodPop posted the tracklist on Instagram after Gaga did and identified producers and writers who worked on the album, including previously unannounced Skrillex, Madeon (who had previously worked with Gaga on her third studio album, Artpop), White Sea, Jacob Kasher, Ryan Tedder, Justin Tranter (who previously appeared in her music video for "Telephone"), Tom Norris, Ely Rise, Johannes Klahr, LIOHN and Madison Love. Regarding whether the Sophie produced tracks made the album's cut, Bloodpop answered a fan that it was yet to be announced.

Title and packaging

Talking about the album's title, Gaga stated "I live on Chromatica, that is where I live. I went into my frame. I found Earth, I deleted it. Earth is canceled. I live on Chromatica." A temporary cover art was released along with the album preorder, showcasing a symbol over a pink background. The singer explained that it "has a sine wave in it, which is the mathematical symbol for sound. And, for me, sound is what healed me in my life period, and it healed me again making this record, and that is really what Chromatica is all about."

Gaga also confirmed how the concept of the planet Chromatica came about, saying:

BloodPop brought it up, and we talked about how Chromatica was essentially on its own when you first look at it, it seems to be about colors and all the different colors and also music is made of a chromatic scale, you know? So it's all the colors, all the sounds, you know, so we, we're talking about inclusivity and life and also a lot of what we see around us and what we're experiencing is math, which is very much like music and sound is math as well. So we talked about that, and then I sort of went back and I said, 'OK, well, yeah, it's inclusivity but it's really a way of thinking,' you know, it's not just, 'Oh, Chromatica, we're being inclusive with all the colors, all the people,' and when I say, 'All the colors, all the people' I mean way more than we could possibly fathom."

On April 5, 2020, the album's official cover was revealed. It shows the singer with "cotton candy pink" hair, wearing a "metallic bodysuit with spikes and studs sticking out of it", "a pair of platform boots with a tusk and a knife for its heels" and a "shoulder-to-fingertip sleeve covered in spikes" on one of her hands. She is attached to a large metal grate illuminated by "hot pink neon" light. Trey Alston from MTV described the cover art as "part-Mad Max, Mortal Kombat, and cyber-punk fantasy", while Hilary Hughes from Billboard also found inspiration from the Alien films.

Release and promotion

In response to tabloid reports saying she might be pregnant, Gaga tweeted on March 12, 2019, "Rumors I'm pregnant? Yeah, I'm pregnant with #LG6." Several news outlets speculated the tweet alluded to a release within a nine-month window, the typical span of a human pregnancy, but the anniversary has since come and gone, proving the theory to be false. In October 2019, she jokingly announced via Twitter that the album would be called Adele after the English singer-songwriter of the same name. In January 2020, several news outlets reported that the album's lead single was scheduled to be released in early February, with the album's release following soon afterwards.

On March 2, 2020, Gaga announced that the album is named Chromatica and that it will be released on April 10, 2020. The pre-order for the album was made available with the announcement. On March 24, Gaga announced in a statement on Instagram and other platforms that the release would be postponed until later that year due to the coronavirus pandemic. On May 6, 2020, she announced that the album would be released on May 29.

Singles

"Stupid Love" was released as the album's lead single on February 28, 2020. It received positive response from music critics, who compared it favorably to the singer's earlier works. Commercially it had a number five peak position both in the US and the UK. The accompanying music video was directed by Daniel Askill and was released on the same day as the single. The Target/deluxe edition bonus track Vitaclub Warehouse remix of the song was released on May 15, 2020.

"Rain on Me" was released as the album’s second single on May 22, 2020, and is a collaboration with Ariana Grande. The accompanying music video featuring Ariana Grande was released several hours after.

Tour

Main article: The Chromatica Ball

On March 5, 2020, Gaga announced she would embark on The Chromatica Ball tour to support the album. The six-date trek is scheduled to begin on July 24, 2020, in Saint-Denis, France and end on August 19, 2020, in East Rutherford, United States.

Track listing

It was revealed the album will contain 16 tracks in total, while the Target exclusive deluxe edition will contain three additional tracks and the Japanese edition will feature one extra song.

Chromatica – Standard edition

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Producer(s)	Length
1.	"Chromatica I"
2.	"Alice"	Stefani Germanotta Axel Hedfors Johannes Klahr	Axwell
3.	"Stupid Love"	Germanotta Max Martin Ely Weisfeld Michael Tucker Martin Bresso	BloodPop Tchami Martin[a] Ben Rice[c]	3:14
4.	"Rain on Me" (with Ariana Grande)	Germanotta Grande Nija Charles Rami Yacoub Tucker Bresso Matthew Burns Alexander Ridha	BloodPop BURNS Tchami[b] Rice[c]	3:02
5.	"Free Woman"	Germanotta Tucker Hedfors Klahr	Axwell
6.	"Fun Tonight"
7.	"Chromatica II"
8.	"911"		BloodPop Madeon
9.	"Plastic Doll"	Germanotta Tucker Sonny Moore	BloodPop Skrillex
10.	"Sour Candy" (with Blackpink)	Germanotta Madison Love Burns Tucker Yacoub
11.	"Enigma"
12.	"Replay"
13.	"Chromatica III"
14.	"Sine from Above" (with Elton John)	Germanotta Richard Zastenker Ryan Tedder Hedfors Klahr John	Axwell
15.	"1000 Doves"
16.	"Babylon"	Germanotta Tucker Bresso Ridha	BloodPop Tchami Boys Noize

Target exclusive edition / International deluxe edition

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
17.	"Love Me Right"
18.	"1000 Doves" (Piano Demo)
19.	"Stupid Love" (Vitaclub Warehouse Mix)	Germanotta Martin Weisfeld Tucker Bresso	3:41

Japanese edition

No.	Title	Length
20.	"TBA"

Notes

• ^{^[a]} signifies a co-producer.
• ^{^[b]} signifies an additional producer.
• ^{^[c]} signifies a vocal producer.

Release history

Release formats for Chromatica

Country	Date	Format	Version	Label	Ref.
Various	May 29, 2020	Digital download streaming vinyl cassette	Standard	Interscope
		CD	Standard deluxe