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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
Benjamin Lee

Lady Gaga announces 13-song Joker companion album Harlequin

Lady Gaga in Venice
Lady Gaga in Venice Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/EPA

Lady Gaga has announced an accompanying 13-song album to her new film Joker: Folie à Deux.

The singer and actor had been teasing the news on social media and has now shared that the album, Harlequin, will be released on 27 September.

The tracklisting for the album suggests that covers from the film, such as Get Happy and Oh, When the Saints, will be mixed with new material. Gaga had already announced that the first song from her seventh studio album would also be dropped in October. The full album will be released in February.

Billboards had teased the number 6.5 in preparation for the Harlequin reveal.

Gaga plays Harleen Quinzel in the musical sequel to the phenomenally successful DC thriller Joker alongside Joaquin Phoenix.

“I wrote a waltz for the movie,” Gaga said to Vogue recently. “And I had a live piano player, Alex Smith, whom I asked to be with me for my scenes. There are moments in the film where I’m playing an adult woman who sings like a little girl. And she’s moving through the world with this kind of immaturity, which I thought was interesting.”

The film premiered at the Venice film festival earlier this month to mixed reviews. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “as strident, laborious and often flat-out tedious” as the original but marked it was an “improvement”.

Joker won two Oscars and made over $1bn worldwide at the box office after release in late 2019. It opened to $96m, but the sequel is tracking behind with experts predicting a $70m start. The Rotten Tomatoes rating is currently at 63% compared with the original’s 69%.

Gaga has enjoyed recent success with Bruno Mars on the duet Die With A Smile. The song has been at the top of the Billboard 200 in the US for the last four weeks. She was also part of the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics.

Joker: Folie à Deux marks the latest big screen role for Gaga after A Star is Born and House of Gucci. She has also appeared in American Horror Story on the small screen.

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