Feb. 28--Ally Maine has left the building.
Lady Gaga released a new single on Thursday night, the 33-year-old pop singer’s first piece of music since her acclaimed starring role opposite Bradley Cooper in his 2018 remake of ‘A Star Is Born’. A knowing return to the flamboyant dance-pop sound that brought her to fame more than a decade ago, ‘Stupid Love’ in which she declares, “Now it’s time to free me from the chain,” over a throbbing disco groove landed on streaming services around 9pm accompanied by a colourful music video in which opposing tribes flex their best moves in a post-apocalyptic desertscape.
“I want people to dance and feel happy,” Gaga said of her new music in a recent interview with Zane Lowe of Apple’s Beats 1. “I put all my heart, all my pain, all my messages from the other realm that I hear... into music that I believe to be so fun and energetically really pure.”
‘Stupid Love’, which Gaga created with a team headed by BloodPop and the Swedish studio wizard Max Martin, comes nearly a year and a half after she appeared in ‘A Star Is Born’ as the latest version of the show-biz hopeful previously played by Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland and Janet Gaynor. For her performance as Ally’ a gifted songwriter in a volatile relationship with Cooper’s rock-star Jackson Maine, Gaga was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress; she won an Oscar for best original song for co-writing ‘Shallow’, her and Cooper’s rootsy power-ballad duet.
In late 2018, the singer kept up the high-toned razzle-dazzle with the premiere of a long-term show at Las Vegas’ Park MGM two of them, in fact: ‘Enigma’, a high-tech pop spectacle with elaborately choreographed renditions of songs like ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Bad Romance’, along with ‘Jazz & Piano’, in which she does standards including ‘Luck Be a Lady’ and ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ while backed by a small orchestra. The residency, for which she’s reportedly being paid $100 million (Dh367 million), is currently scheduled through mid-May.
Gaga’s last album (not counting the soundtrack from ‘A Star Is Born’) was 2016’s classic-rock-inspired ‘Joanne’.”
