Lady Gaga announces surprise ‘Joker 2’ companion album ‘Harlequin’

The end of 2024 is going to be a busy one for Lady Gaga and a joyous time for her fans, known as ‘Little Monsters’.

The singer-actress announced she was preparing to drop the first single from her forthcoming seventh studio album in October. But Mother Monster has just revealed a surprise drop of a soundtrack titled ‘Harlequin’ – a companion album for the release of Joker: Folie À Deux, the sequel to 2019’s Oscar-winning film Joker.

‘Harlequin’ will be released on Friday 27 September, a week before the release of Joker: Folie À Deux, and will feature 13 songs – all newly recorded versions of classic songs like ‘That’s Entertainment’ that appear in the film. Scroll down for the full tracklist.

Gaga stars in the sequel alongside Joaquin Phoenix, in which she plays a reimagined version of the beloved comic book character Harley Quinn – Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, an arsonist who is a big fan of Joker’s.

Joker: Folie À Deux has been billed as a “jukebox musical”, and features a fair few musical numbers, during which the Joker and Lee sing and dance to showtune classics.

The film premiered in Competition at the Venice Film Festival. In our review, we noted that Gaga was one of the strongest elements of the film, but that she “feels wasted as a supporting player instead of the double-bill headliner.”

We also wrote that the “audacious gambit of utilising song-and-dance numbers falls flat, as they do little to further the narrative or character motivations; instead, they feel like the excuse the director needed to cast Gaga. Worse, the chosen songs are so on-the-nose that the sounds of ‘That’s Entertainment’, ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’, ‘What the World Needs Now’ and ‘Gonna Build A Mountain’ are groan-worthy and suggest that Phillips was at a loss when it came to plot so just tagged on some songs to pad out the screen-time.”

Read our full review of this underwhelming and strangely monotonous sequel, which is nonetheless one of 2024’s most anticipated releases.

Here is the tracklist to ‘Harlequin’:  

1. Good Morning

2. Get Happy (2024)

3. Oh, When the Saints

4. World on a String

5. If My Friends Could See Me Now

6. That’s Entertainment

7. Smile

8. The Joker

9. Folie à Deux

10. Gonna Build a Mountain

11. Close to You

12. Happy Mistake

13. That’s Life 

The album is 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’.  

Gaga’s new album of original material has been refered to as “LG7” – as opposed to ‘Harlequin’, which she’s calling “LG6.5”. She has already announced that the first song from her seventh studio album would also drop in October. The full album will be released in February.

‘Harlequin’ is out on Friday; Joker: Folie À Deux hits theatres worldwide on 4 October.