Joanne is Gaga’s best album to date. After pop hits like “Born This Way” and “Applause,” Gaga strips down to create a more acoustic kind of music.

With Joanne, Gaga starts over with music that feels clean, restrained and modest, words that you wouldn’t usually associate with her past hits. It’s an old-school soft-rock album, with a focus on the acoustic guitar.

{Joanne still shows traces of Gaga’s pop genre and hit-making past,  as shown in  singles “Perfect Illusion” and “A-YO,”  The rest of the album tells a different story; one of an artist stripping away the outrages, sounds, makeup, and costumes that have accompanied the rest of her releases and introducing  a collection of songs focusing on country and western themes. The album’s quieter tracks are among Gaga’s most honest performances to date, her voice is simple and human-sounding without the trademark theatrical pronunciations she’s adopted over the years.

No song better illustrates Gaga’s newly-realized potential than the title track, in which she adopts a classic-folk twang to sing a heartbreaking love letter to her aunt, sounding like a completely different artist than the one behind “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance.”

In the writing of this album Gaga worked with Beck, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Florence Welch, Father John Misty, and BloodPop.