It’s been nearly eight years, and Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP could still mean anything — maybe even a sequel, some fans hope. A fan recently created a Change.org petition asking Gaga to release outtakes from her ARTPOP sessions as an “Act II” to the album, prompted by the album’s producer, DJ White Shadow, hinting at unreleased tracks like fan-favorite “Tea” (as an April Fool’s joke, he later claimed). The petition, which now has over 40,000 signatures, led fans to trend the hashtag #buyARTPOPoniTunes and got Lady Gaga’s fourth album to the top three on the platform. And it even caught the attention of Mother Monster herself. Gaga tweeted on April 13 that the petition and hashtag “inspired such a tremendous warmth in my heart.” “Making this album was like heart surgery, I was desperate, in pain, and poured my heart into electronic music that slammed harder than any drug I could find,” she wrote of the album, her sometimes-misunderstood last electro-pop project before the Americana-inspired album Joanne and the film A Star Is Born.
In another tweet, Gaga continued, “I fell apart after I released this album. Thank you for celebrating something that once felt like destruction. We always believed it was ahead of its time. Years later turns out, sometimes, artists know. And so do little monsters.” And little monsters also know that even though we don’t have ARTPOP Act II yet, there’s still Gaga’s 2020 return to the dance floor, Chromatica, to get us through.
