Harlequin Album ∙ Pop ∙ 2024 Lady Gaga In the summer of 2023, Lady Gaga began dropping hints about a mysterious project she’d been working on in secret—new music, so she claimed, that sounded nothing like her past work. Fans wondered whether it could be “LG7,” the long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Chromatica , until September 2024, when billboards popped up with the message “LG6.5.” The surprise between the pop auteur’s sixth and seventh studio albums turns out to be Harlequin , a concept album delivered from the warped perspective of Lee Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, her character in Todd Phillips’ Joker-fied jukebox musical Joker: Folie à Deux . As is often the case for actors who temporarily inhabit Gotham City, Gaga realized shortly after filming wrapped that she hadn’t yet moved on from the character she’d been embodying. She began to conceptualize an album of updated jazz standards sung as the Joker’s main squeeze. Harlequin , recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-L...