Lady Gaga's New Album Is in the Works, Singer Talks Music on the 2016 Oscars Red Carpet

Chris Pizzello/AP
Culture

Lady Gaga looked like a classic Hollywood starlet Sunday night at the 88th Academy Awards. On the red carpet, she talked to Ryan Seacrest not about the year in film, or even her thoughts on the cloud of controversy surrounding the Oscars' lack of diversity (the nominees were as white as her power jumpsuit), but about her rumored new album, reportedly slated for release this year.

"Well, I, you know, I'm working on my record," Gaga told Seacrest, appearing somewhat taken aback by the question. "You know, I'm so happy to be in the studio and to have such an incredible team ... I get to wake up every day and not think about the cameras, and being famous and being a celebrity, I get to think about what I love, which is making people happy through music."

Read more: Lady Gaga Invited Dozens of Survivors of Sexual Assault Onstage for Her Oscars Performance
Chris Pizzello/AP

It's been about a year and a half since her jazzy collaboration with Tony Bennett on the duo's 2014 album, Cheek to Cheek, and it appears she might be making another stark transition from the previous character and flare she embodied for her fourth studio album. Earlier this year, backstage at the 2016 Golden Globes, Lady Gaga said her image for the new album was still evolving.

When asked when the album might drop, Gaga told reporters, "That's a difficult thing to say as I don't know that you yet know what I will look like for my next album, as I'm still creating all of those things," Entertainment Weekly reported last month. "It's something that is a gradual change always with me. What was nice about playing the Countess [in American Horror Story: Hotel] is it reminded me that in my own life and in my music, I'm always, at times, playing a character, and I become them fully. And living inside of her was liberating, I'll tell you, because she doesn't give a shit about anything."

At the Oscars, Gaga paid a heartfelt tribute to survivors of sexual assault with her transcendent performance of "Til It Happens to You," from the documentary The Hunting Ground, which sheds light on sexual assaults on college campuses. She was accompanied onstage by other sexual assault survivors; Lady Gaga herself has said she was sexually assaulted at the age of 19.