Lady Gaga’s new album came from an unexpected source. In her Vogue cover story, published on Sept. 5, the singer revealed that her seventh studio album will be released in February, and it turns out that the album — which she dubs LG7 for now — was a request from her fiancé, Michael Polansky.
“Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’”
Polansky also opened up about wanting Gaga to make her new album, noting that she’s “happiest” while creating. “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to the joy of it,” he told Vogue. “On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her; I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”
Gaga kept it vague regarding the album’s details but played one song that the interviewer described as “intense and ominous—an old-school Gaga banger, unsettling but also buoyant.” As she confirmed on Sept. 3, the first single from LG7 will be released in October.
However, Gaga did say that her mindset during the creative process was in stark contrast to when she recorded her 2020 album Chromatica, which she described as “an absolutely horrible time” for her mental health. “I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery,” she said. “And now, Michael and I are really excited to organize our lives—and our marriage—around our creative output as a couple.”
How Gaga & Michael Met
Gaga and Polansky have kept their relationship private, but she couldn’t help but gush about her fiancé to Vogue. She recalled that her mother, Cynthia, met the entrepreneur first. “She said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’ and I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’” Gaga told Vogue. “I could never have imagined that my mom…found the most perfect person for me?”
The two met at a birthday party for Polansky’s colleague in 2019 and talked for three hours. “I was struck immediately by her warmth and openness—she was so genuinely curious about what my life was like growing up in Minnesota,” Polansky said. They went on their first date a few weeks later, then shacked up at Gaga’s Malibu home in 2020.
“It was really kind of special,” she recalled. “I’d been so focused on my career since I was a teenager. And the gift of that time was that I got to completely focus on my relationship. I met this totally supportive, loving human being who wanted to get to know me—outside of Lady Gaga.”
The couple have stayed low-key, with Gaga sharing an occasional Instagram photo of them. They didn’t announce their engagement publicly. Instead, Gaga casually introduced Polansky as her “fiancé” to French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal at the Paris Olympics in July, and the moment was caught in a viral video.
“I had never met anyone like Michael,” she said. “He’s so smart and so kind. And his life and my life are very different. He’s a very private guy and he’s not with me for any other reason than that we are right for each other.”
