Lady Gaga released her next work of infallible genius, "The Dead Dance," an ethereal single steeped in darkness from the dark ages, but electrifying enough to shake a graveyard and not too on the nose for graviteous body-vamps to dance to. Dropped alongside Netflix's Wednesday Season 2, the song comes with a creepy Tim Burton–directed music video shot on the spookified Island of the Dolls in Xochimilco, Mexico.
It's way more than just another Gaga single, it's a gateway to the uncanny world of Nevermore Academy. In episode six, Gaga herself pops up as Rosaline Rotwood, a 1960s psychic teacher so mysterious she practically comesos through the song.
"The Dead Dance" is a conversation between the darkwave pulse, pop theatricality, and undoubted vocal ferocity of Gaga. Co-written by Lady Gaga with Andrew Watt and Henry Walter and produced alongside Watt and Cirkut, the track rattles with the threat and attraction of her presence. It's danceable but unsettling, catchy yet otherworldly, just the kind of alchemy at which Gaga has long excelled.
The video, soaked in Burton's characteristic surrealism, takes us far into a dreamscape of dolls and shadows. Gaga holds the screen, her star power and spectral mystique entwined, as if performing a ritual without dogma. It's a visual and sonic statement forged in the collision of Burton's gothic imagination and Gaga's fearlessly maximalist artistry.