(Interscope)
The pop superstar sounds fully in her element in these immaculately covered classics, but the whiff of big band week on the X Factor is hard to shift

At the recent London premiere of twisted musical love story Joker: Folie à Deux, Lady Gaga, who stars as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel/Harley Quinn, was asked about her relationship to the character. Having studied method acting for a decade in her teens, and become highly adept on chaotically entertaining press tours for House of Gucci and A Star Is Born, Gaga described “a complex woman that wants to be whoever she wants to be at any given moment”. If the fusion between Harley Quinn and herself wasn’t already abundantly clear, she added: “And will not let anyone pin her down.”

And so it is that after having teased a forthcoming seventh album of pop bangers for early next year, and with its first single apparently due next month, Gaga now drops what has been teased on billboards as “LG6.5”, a jazz-tinged, 40-minute big band curio made up of 13 songs. Harlequin is being billed as a “companion album” to the Joker sequel, rather than a proper Lady Gaga release, and features a clutch of covers alongside two originals. Within the context of Gaga’s discography it sits more alongside Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, her two albums of jazz standards with Tony Bennett, than it does her last album, 2020’s cyberpunk influenced electropop opus, Chromatica.