When Lady Gaga first announced ‘Mayhem’ in January, she said it “started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved”. She hasn’t literally tried to recreate the sound of 2008 – there’s no reunion with her ‘Just Dance’ producer RedOne – but Gaga has tapped into her old sense of excess. On her first proper pop album since 2020’s house-infused ‘Chromatica’, she dials absolutely everything up to eleven.
Gaga telegraphed her return to core values on recent single ‘Abracadabra’, a sinewy synth-pop banger that culminates in a truly ludicrous vocal hook: “Abracadabra, amor-oo-na-na!” Thankfully, it’s no red herring on an album that stomps out of the speakers with unselfconscious confidence. We get Gaga delivering a stuttering, ‘Poker Face’-style vocal hook on ‘Garden of Eden’, Prince-ish slinkiness mixed with punk on ‘Killah’ and the dark melodrama of ‘Bad’-era Michael Jackson on ‘The Beast’.
Longtime Little Monsters will find plenty of references to Gaga’s pop past as well. Take ‘Perfect Celebrity’, where she comes across as a battle-hardened version of the starlet she played on her 2008 debut ‘The Fame’. “You love to hate mе, I’m the perfect celebrity,” she sings, before an onslaught of lashing guitars remind you that Gaga’s stage name is a nod to a Queen song.
Co-producing with Andrew Watt (Rolling Stones, Post Malone) and Cirkut (Charli XCX, Rosé), Gaga infuses her bombastic dance-pop sound with stadium rock theatrics throughout. ‘Don’t Call Tonight’, an evocative and anthemic snapshot of a toxic relationship, is begging to be belted out in front of 70,000 lit-up smartphones. Then there’s disco-rap banger ‘Zombieboy’, where Gaga sounds a bit like a musical theatre kid channelling Blondie’s Debbie Harry – but just about gets away with it.
There’s a nonchalant confidence in the way Gaga sticks to her maximalist vision without pandering to contemporary pop trends. Most ‘Mayhem’ tracks run close to or over four minutes, making them mini-epics in the TikTok era. Only ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’, which has shades of ‘1989’-era Taylor Swift and Yazoo’s synth-pop classic ‘Only You’, doesn’t sound totally and thrillingly Gaga. ‘Die With A Smile’, her relatively restrained soft rock duet with Bruno Mars, is sequenced at the end like a palate cleanser after a feast of bold flavours.
Ultimately, ‘Mayhem’ feels like a great Gaga album because it’s just so much fun. At times, it’s a bit like reconnecting with an old friend who makes sense even when they seem to be chatting nonsense. When she sings “river in my eyes, I’ve got a poem in my throat” on ‘LoveDrug’, it’s just her overblown way of saying she’s sad and tongue-tied. Seventeen years after she broke through with ‘Just Dance’, Lady Gaga remains pop’s foremost agent of impeccably crafted chaos.
Details
- Record label: Streamline / Interscope
- Release date: March 7, 2025