It's time for people to show Lady Gaga's Joanne album the respect it deserves

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In 2015, Lady Gaga unceremoniously announced she was ‘quitting pop music.’ The bombshell was later clarified to be a playful April Fools’ gag.

Although, the joke began to wear thin with her pop-adoring fans, because following the release of 2016’s Joanne, it appeared Mother Monster had ditched the genre completely.

With Gaga’s pop music renaissance Chromatica upon us — the singer’s first all-out pop record in seven years — we now know this isn’t the case.

With its ‘stripped down’ country and soft-rock sound, Joanne wasn’t the first time Gaga had ventured into new territory. Just two years earlier the pop chameleon teamed up with legendary jazz crooner Tony Bennett on Cheek to Cheek.

However, this was Stefani Germanotta’s first solo project to drift away from her usual schtick, and it was a hard pill to swallow for even the most ardent Gaga fans.

Joanne’s rock-tinged lead single Perfect Illusion offered the first glimpse of change, and it soon became clear the album would not adhere to the standard Gaga theatrics we’d become accustomed to. She was swapping the meat dress for a cowboy hat-denim shorts combo, and for the first time appeared to lay herself bare to the world.

Inspired by her late aunt, the album tracks are some of Gaga’s most personal to date, with an underlying theme of family running throughout. Complemented with a stripped-back sound and dive bar aesthetic, critics largely agreed that with Joanne, Gaga had succeeded in what she set out to achieve.

The acclaim wasn’t enough to convince some fans (lovingly referred to as Little Monsters), however. Many of whom weren’t quite so enthusiastic about her retreat from eccentric pop.

As a longtime fan, I couldn’t fathom the criticism. Primarily because Joanne was, and still is, one of her best releases to date.

There, I said it.