Lady Gaga battles past versions of herself in new music video for “Disease”

Lady Gaga has inhabited many different versions of herself in the last decade of her career and in the new video for “Disease,” she exchanges blows with a few of them.

In the first big taste of what’s to come from the pop star’s seventh album, Gaga puts herself on blast in the video for the first single, where terrible things transpire in what would otherwise appear to be a sleepy suburb stalked by one version of herself with bloodshot eyes that could really use an ointment of some sort. Wearing an all-black outfit and matching mask, this look harkens back to the avant-garde Gaga most people may be familiar with.

At a certain point though, other versions of Gaga fight each other, sprinting down the street while dancing. Gaga herself said in a post on Instagram, “I think a lot about the relationship I have with my own inner demons. 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 writes of the single. “I can try and run from them but they are still part of me and I can run and run but eventually I’ll meet that part of myself again, even if only for a moment. 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.”

Her fans and critics seem to be into it, with one fan sharing their take on the video in a post to Xwriting, “We’ve dreamed of having this Lady Gaga back. I am in tears.”

“Lady Gaga is insane for this,” another fan postedpresumably favorably.

“This is cinema!” another fan writes, clocking in on the takes.

Keeping an eye on the numbers, the fan account Lady Gaga Now shared that the artist is “currently outperforming the entire iTunes US Top 10 combined in sales.”

Watch the video for “Disease” below:

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