Gaga dances, fights, and runs from monstrous versions of herself in the video for her maximalist pop track
Lady Gaga paired her dark electro-pop track “Disease” with an equally menacing music video on Tuesday night.
The four-and-a-half-minute visual sees Gaga confront macabre versions of herself, including an all leather Gaga complete with bloodshot eyes, towering heels, a zippered mask, and long steel-studded finger nails. Throughout the chaotic video, which takes place in a quiet suburban neighborhood, the star fends off, fights, embraces, and runs away from her personified fears.
Gaga shed insight into her thought-process behind the video on Instagram stories earlier on Tuesday. “I think a lot about the relationship I have with my own inner demons,” she wrote. “It’s never been easy for me to face how I get seduced by chaos and turmoil. It makes me feel claustrophobic. Disease is about facing that fear, facing myself and my inner darkness, and realizing that sometimes I can’t win or escape the parts of myself that scare me.”
She continued, “Dancing, morphing, running, purging. Again and again, back with myself. This integration is ultimately beautiful to me because it’s mine and I’ve learned to handle it.”
The musician and actress added that she is the “conductor of my own symphony,” before concluding: “No matter how scary the question, the answers are inside of me. Essential, inextricable parts of what makes me me. I save myself by keeping going. I am the whole me, I am strong, and I am up for the challenge. Happy Halloween.”
“Disease” is the first single from Gaga’s forthcoming seventh studio album — dubbed LG7, according to a press release — and will follow 2020’s Chromatica. In August, she collaborated with Bruno Mars to release “Die With a Smile.” The duet has been a commercial success, debuting at Number Three on the Billboard Hot 100.