The release of a new Lady Gaga album is an event. Ever since the release of the singer’s second album, The Fame Monster, each subsequent record has arrived with significant fanfare and rabid excitement from her Little Monsters. With Born This Way, she arrived in an egg at the Grammys. For Artpop, she soared into a fan event featuring artwork by Jeff Koons in a flying dress and a gimp mask. The leadup to the more rootsy Joanne saw her touring dive bars in a pink hat, before she taking the stage at the Super Bowl only months later. Even Chromatica, released in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, managed to maintain a sense of occasion, Gaga beaming into Zoom parties and appearing with Ariana Grande in a (socially distanced and masked-up) MTV VMAs performance.
When Gaga began teasing her seventh album Mayhem, released on March 7, pop was braced for another blockbuster roll out. Lead single “Disease” hinted at a return to the darker, more industrial sound of Born This Way, while follow up “Abracadabra”, with its Berghain-sized beats and gothic Phantom of the Opera vocals, arrived like a hit of gay serotonin. The music videos also had an air of the old Gaga: filled with tight choreography, numerous characters and theatrical symbolism, she held in her eyes the same savage hunger that lit the videos for “Marry the Night” and “Alejandro”.
Such fire is something that, over the last ten years, has sometimes felt absent for Gaga. Despite a successful side-step into acting, multiple tours, a Vegas residency, a number of hit records and the launch of a commercially viable makeup brand, an uncomfortable tension appeared to have built between the popstar persona she had cultivated for nearly 20 years and the Italian-American from New York known as Stefani Germanotta. While she’s always leant into the bombastic absurdity of pop, being Lady Gaga hasn’t necessarily seemed all that fun.
This fact became particularly apparent in the promo campaign for her last album Chromatica. During an interview with Zane Lowe, Gaga seemed fractured and despondent. “I used to wake up in the morning, and I would realise I was ‘Lady Gaga.’ And then I became very depressed and sad, and I didn’t want to be myself,” she said. “I felt threatened by the things my career brought into my life and the pace of my life.” While Gaga said that recording Chromatica was “the beginning of my journey to healing”, as a fan it was difficult to see someone buckling under the weight of what they had created for themselves. It also felt like the culmination of something that began with Artpop back in 2013.
After the cultural dominance of “Bad Romance” and the commercial high of Born This Way, Artpop was an unwieldily beast that saw Gaga at her most conceptual, camp and bonkers. While the album has since received (deserved) critical reappraisal, at the time it was met with bafflement – as one review stated: “It’s a bizarre album of squelchy disco (plus a handful of forays into R&B) that aspires to link gallery culture and radio heaven, preferring concepts to choruses.” This perceived pretentiousness was also affecting public sentiment, a fact Gaga playfully acknowledged in a performance at the MTV VMAs, which deliberately began with the bray of boos and calls of “Gaga is over”. For some, after a five-year onslaught of theatre kid freakiness, relentless bangers and meat dresses, the experiment of pop stardom as performance art had run out of steam.
Perhaps Gaga felt this, too. During the ArtRave, the tour that accompanied Artpop, she seemed lost among the neon, psychedelic polka dot inflatables and hard EDM. The fact that she followed it all up with Cheek to Cheek, a collaborative album with Tony Bennett of lounge-y jazz standards, felt like a deliberate recalibration. Or, as Gaga put it, a rebellion “after years of producers and record label people telling me to make my voice sound more radio-friendly”.
The arrival of 2016’s soft rock and stripped-back Joanne was another rebellious act. But for all its thematic sincerity (the album was, in part, a Germanotta family therapy session) and aspirations of rustic authenticity, at its heart was an artist in conflict with her indelible eccentricity: ultimately, its Americana aesthetic was more dress up than dive bar.
While Gaga’s control over her own ideas was sometimes questionable, her command of her artistry was always tight. Joanne, however, felt like someone whose vision had faltered. “I was just having a really depressed time in my life where I wasn’t able to see my own ability or my own talent,” Gaga told NME in an interview around the album’s release. “And when you lose grasp of those sorts of things, you can just spiral.”
We saw that spiral in all its unflinching pain in the documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two. Struggling with chronic pain, trauma stemming from sexual violence and PTSD, the once imperious pop figure was battered, broken and disembodied from star she once was: “I don’t need to have a million wigs on and all that shit to make a statement,” she says in the film. “I know that we want to elevate everything. I’m trying to elevate everything, but I can’t elevate it to a point where I become Lady Gaga again.”
It would take three years and the making of A Star Is Born – a movie that, despite its camp promotional campaign, felt like a continuation of this resistance – for Gaga to approach her role as pop star once more for Chromatica. Even then, it was tough. In one interview, she discussed being dragged into the recording booth while “crying or venting about something that was happening in my life over some pain or depression I was feeling”. Speaking to Rolling Stone, producer BloodPop said that recording process was often so difficult that Gaga would dress up as it was “easier [for her] to feel like someone else”. The album may have marked a return to rocket fuelled dance music, inflected with 90s house and brash euro-pop, but its author was still “dancing through her pain”.
Fast forward five years and the Lady Gaga we find on Mayhem no longer sounds so wounded. While “Disease” and “Abracadabra” hinted at an aggressive and macabre album of oil-streaked grunginess, this was mostly a red herring. While Gaga certainly plunges in the into some murky and unpleasant depths, the overarching mood of the album is far funkier as she turns her head up and faces the sun.
Reaching that state has clearly involved some self-referentiality. Following their release, both “Disease” and “Abracadabra” drew comparisons to the Gaga found among the vampiric gnashing of The Fame Monster and the hair metal of Born This Way, but elsewhere Mayhem leans heavily into the sonic frivolity of debut album The Fame. There are undeniable calls to the breezy high of “Boys Boys Boys” on the growling disco of “Zombieboy”, and the bubbling “Don’t Call Tonight” is like a grown “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)”. On “How Bad Do U Want Me”, meanwhile, there’s a carefree sweetness that we haven’t heard from Gaga since “Summerboy” (filtered through Yazoo’s “Only You” and, rather anachronistically, Taylor Swift’s Lover era).
Gaga has never shied away from her influences, but on Mayhem there’s a delightfully brazen utilisation of them. There’s Prince’s DNA all over the Gesaffelstein-assisted “Killah”, its rubbery synths accompanied by Bowie-esque trills of guitar, while the gnarly and haunted “Perfect Celebrity” is Nine Inch Nails meets Van Halen, Gaga referencing her own music as she sings: “Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high/Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.”
Most surprising, though, is the simplicity to the songs on Mayhem. Some might call them unadventurous, especially after such fearless swings such as Artpop and The Fame Monster, but there’s a solidity to the songwriting. Exemplifying this is the record’s overall confidence: for a less assured artist, a song like “Shadow Of a Man” could easily have slipped into either self-pity or saccharine self-empowerment, but instead we find Gaga as the emboldened final form last seen strutting away from fires of the “Marry The Night” video.
For Gaga, this faith in her artistry couldn’t have occurred without finally accepting and unifying her public and private self. “I’m the creator and I made all of it, and that helped me to value myself as a musician and a songwriter in a deeper way,’” she said in a recent interview, adding: “Confronting the music was a way of confronting some of the things I’ve been through and saying, ‘It’s okay that’s who you are.’”
After nearly a decade running from her creation, Mayhem is ultimately the result of a hard-worn reclamation of a persona by an artist whose life was threatened by a chaos of her own design. Now she’s taken ownership, both Lady Gaga and her Little Monsters have their paws up once more. As the stans say: “We’re so back.”
