Listen to Lady Gaga's extremely dramatic new companion song from Joker: Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux is the upcoming sequel to 2019's Joker, a smash hit Batman spinoff starring Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill wretch who becomes Gotham City's clown prince of crime. In Folie à Deux, he'll meet Harley Quinn, the love of his life, and together they will make beautiful, demented music.

Although director Todd Phillips has gone back and forth on whether Folie à Deux is actually a musical or not, there will definitely be singing in it. Pop star Lady Gaga is playing Harley Quinn, after all, and you don't let a set of pipes like those go to waste. Gaga is even releasing a companion album for the movie called Harlequin, to come out on September 27. She dropped a snippet of one song, "The Joker," on social media:

"The Joker" is actually a song written for the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It's been covered by a lot of people over the years. Check out Shirley Bassey's 1968 version:

It looks like all of the songs on Harlequin will be covers. The album has a lot of big band songs from the '50s and '60s on it, which are definitely in Gaga's range. We'll probably hear most or all of them in the movie. Check out the track list below:

1. "Good Morning"
2. "Get Happy"
3. "Oh, When the Saints"
4. "World on a String"
5. "If My Friends Could See Me Now"
6. "That's Entertainment"
7. "Smile"
8. "The Joker"
9. "Folie à Deux"
10. "Gonna Build a Mountain"
11. "Close to You"
12. "Happy Mistake"
13. "That's Life"

You can also hear some of Gaga's rendition of the Frank Sinatra classic "That's Life" in one of the trailers for the movie:

Is Joker: Folie à Deux a musical or not?

As I mentioned up top, there's been some back and forth about whether this movie is or isn't a musical. Director Todd Phillips clarified his position while promoting the film on Fresh Air. “I’ve gotten a little bit in trouble in the past for, you know, kind of saying, ‘Well, the movie’s not really a musical,’" he said. "And I, for the record, probably should be correcting that. It is, in fact, you know, it’s a movie with music in it where people sing, sometimes what they’re feeling — it’s the very definition of a musical."

So why the waffling back and forth? Apparently it's all about the feeling:

"The musicals I tend to love, or musicals in general, when you walk out of them, you feel a lot better than you did when you walked into them. And oftentimes, you find yourself whistling the music from the musical that you just saw. And I, I guess I didn’t want to mislead people because I don’t know that you leave this movie feeling better than you did when you walked in. So I always think the term ‘musical’ has a very, like, positive slant to it. So in some respects, that was my kind of reticence of using the term."

This response smells a little weird to me; if the movie has people singing songs in it, and this one does, it's a musical, regardless of whether it's uplifting or not. There are lots of depressing musicals out there. In Cabaret the Nazis win. Dancer In The Dark robs you of your will to live. C'mon, Todd.

I wonder if the cast and crew are ducking the "musical" label more because musicals haven't been widely popular in the United States since the '60s and they don't want to scare away potential audiences. Whatever the reason, Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on October 4.

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h/t CNN