Lady Gaga has announced the album ‘Harlequin’, a companion album to the movie Joker: Folie à Deux.
The album is set for release this Friday (September 27) a week before the movie opens in cinemas worldwide on October 4, the fifth anniversary of 2019’s Joker. Gaga appears alongside Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the titular Joker, while the likes of Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, Brendan Gleeson and Zazie Beetz also feature.
The singer – real name Stefani Germanotta, who plays Harley Quinn in the movie – shared the news on social media this afternoon (September 24).
Joker: Folie à Deux has been referred to as a jukebox musical, with covers of a number of jazz standards including ‘Oh, When The Saints’, ‘Get Happy‘ and ‘That’s Life‘, along with a few original tracks, which are all set to feature on ‘Harlequin’.
In an interview with Vogue earlier this month, Gaga said that she drew on her own experiences when playing the character: “Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture. I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside – for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labelled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet?”
She continued: “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”
NME gave Joker: Folie à Deux a four-star review, saying that Gaga “shines in a provocative prison musical” and: “[director Todd] Phillips and [co-writer Scott] Silver have delivered the last thing anyone expected: a socially responsible Joker movie that finds an intriguing way to explore the consequences (both on and offscreen) of the first film. Joker fans shouldn’t cry too hard though – Warner Bros. have cleverly found a way to leave the door open a little for the franchise to continue, should the need arise.“
Last month, however, Phillips suggested that Folie à Deux is likely to be the final film in the Joker franchise: “It was fun to play in this sort of sandbox for two movies, but I think we’ve said what we wanted to say in this world.”
The album, meanwhile, will be Gaga’s first since 2021’s ‘Love For Sale’, a collaborative album with the late Tony Bennett – her last solo studio album was 2020’s ‘Chromatica’. She’s previously revealed plans to release a new album of original material in 2025, describing it as LG7 – her seventh album – as opposed to ‘Harlequin’, which she’s calling LG6.5.
The complete ‘Harlequin’ tracklist is:
- ‘Good Morning’
- ‘Get Happy (2024)’
- ‘Oh, When the Saints’
- ‘World On a String’
- ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’
- ‘That’s Entertainment’
- ‘Smile’
- ‘The Joker’
- ‘Folie à Deux’
- ‘Gonna Build a Mountain’
- ‘Closer to You’
- ‘Happy Mistake’
- ‘That’s Life’
In August, she shared the single ‘Die With A Smile’, a duet with Bruno Mars, but this is expected to be a standalone track that won’t appear on an album.
She hinted in a previous Instagram post that the first single from her seventh album will be coming this month, too, following the release of Joker: Folie à Deux.