LADY GAGA had just dropped what is sure to be the song of the summer, “Rain on Me,” an irresistibly earwormy ’90s throwback featuring Ariana Grande. The house music banger’s new music video, which premiered Friday morning, features the two pop-queen warriors reigning over an anime rave on the fantastic planet Chromatica, in a dazzling display of cyberpunk girl power.

But surprisingly, Gaga, whose “Chromatica” album drops next week, confessed in a recent interview with Apple Music’s Beats 1 host Zane Lowe that she was initially “ashamed” to pursue a friendship with Grande — and that this dynamite duet would have never happened if Grande hadn’t pursued and encouraged her.

Gaga revealed that she initially pushed Grande away because she was worried that she would be a bad influence on her younger peer — who was coping with the trauma from the 2017 bombing at her Manchester concert and the 2018 overdose death of her ex-boyfriend, Mac Miller.

“[Grande] was so persistent. She would try over and over again to be friends with me,” Gaga told Lowe. “And I was too ashamed to hang out with her, because I didn’t want to project all of this negativity onto something that was healing and so beautiful.”

After that conversation, that very night an inspired Gaga wrote “Rain on Me” — a song that she said “has many layers” and is “a metaphor for the amount of drinking that I was doing to numb myself” while dealing with her own trauma.

Gaga said the “true partnership” she and Grande forged while recording “Rain on Me” and shooting its music video was crucial to her own healing process. “She was so open to trying things that she hasn’t done before.

Celebrating the Thursday evening release of the “Rain on Me” track and the Friday morning premiere of the video, Gaga and Grande took to social media to celebrate each other.

(SD-Agencies)