It’s telling that the first lyric of “Mayhem,” the highly anticipated seventh studio album by global pop superstar Lady Gaga, signals a shift in thinking. “There are no more tears to cry,” Gaga sings on “Disease,” the headbanging, electroclash mammoth of an album opener. She hurls the words forward from the back of her throat, letting every note ascribed to the song’s off-kilter double harmonic scale pierce the flesh. It’s impossible not to believe her when she sings with such conviction, yet it sounds as if Gaga is snarling in defiance, looking at someone who questions her serenity dead in the eye before spitting in their face.
And like “Disease” so boldly indicates as the album’s first single, the joy coexists with the suffering, marking “Mayhem” as Gaga’s first album in over a decade born from love and not pain.
A second before Gaga sings this line in the song’s music video, where she battles against doppelgangers trying to kill her, she seizes her body as if someone put two defibrillator paddles to her chest and yelled, “Clear!” This is Gaga revived, somehow still alive despite lying battered on the hood of a car driven by a leather-clad lookalike she’s since dubbed the Mistress of Mayhem. When she released the video in October of last year, Gaga attached a statement, saying: “I am the conductor of my own symphony. I am every actor in the plays that are my art and my life. No matter how scary the question, the answers are inside of me. Essential, inextricable parts of what makes me me. I save myself by keeping going. I am the whole me, I am strong, and I am up for the challenge.”
For the Little Monsters, Gaga’s dedicated (and often hyper-critical) fanbase, releasing “Disease” as the first single from “Mayhem” signaled a return to the “dark pop” sound Gaga cut her teeth on, with her experimental, boundary-pushing work on albums like “Born This Way” and “The Fame Monster.” But another part of the statement accompanying the video should’ve been paid more attention. “‘I can try and run from [my inner demons], but they are still a part of me,” Gaga said. “Eventually, I’ll meet that part of myself again, if only for a moment.”
As it turns out, the dark, industrial sound fans expected from “Mayhem” was only part of the truth. Listeners would’ve been more keen to heed her words rather than the sonic landscape surrounding them. On “Mayhem,” Gaga presents an almost reactionary response to what her fans have demanded of her versus what she wants for herself. The album flits between genres she’s honed in throughout her 20-year career, swerving between all of Gaga’s past works so dextrously that it creates a sound different for the superstar altogether. Her voice sounds different, too. It’s confident, brimming with affection and excitement; experimental but still Gaga. Perhaps that’s because, for the first time, Gaga has made an album that’s formally about being in love, and all of the internal work one must do to craft a successful, healthy partnership. “Mayhem” presents a crisp picture of a woman who has been pushed and pulled for two decades — both by her own hand and the whims of the world — learning to balance her two selves. It navigates the persona and the person, finding thrilling points of overlap. And like “Disease” so boldly indicates as the album’s first single, the joy coexists with the suffering, marking Gaga’s first album in over a decade born from love and not pain.
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Since 2013’s “Artpop,” Gaga’s music has been consumed by her anguish. At the time, she called “Artpop” an album about her “pain exploding through electronic music.” In earlier songs like “Brown Eyes,” “Bad Romance,” “Dance in the Dark” and “Monster,” Gaga sang of heartbreak and the feeling of being diminished by egomaniacal male presences. But Gaga’s songwriting on “Artpop” felt like a brick in comparison. After championing equal rights, immigration reform and free love on “Born This Way,” Gaga stopped her crusade and retreated inward. On “Artpop,” she sang about submission, substance abuse, being addicted to her own fame, loneliness and, in one of her most chilling yet cathartic songs to this day, sexual assault.
Lady Gaga is seen signing autographs on March 5, 2025, in New York, New York. ( MEGA/GC Images/Getty Images)In a recent in-depth interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Gaga said that “Artpop” was a response to living up to her own image, a work of intentional defiance that sought to shatter the public’s perception of her. If you know anything about the response to that album, saying that Gaga was successful in that mission is an understatement. The record probed Gaga’s pain, but ultimately brought her more misery — not to mention even more difficulty with a hip injury she experienced the year before, which resulted in chronic pain and fibromyalgia. In the years that followed, she spoke candidly about how her PTSD from sexual assault would cause her physical pain to flare up and her body to spasm. She sang about that torment on her 2016 album “Joanne,” the production of which was chronicled in a Netflix documentary, “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” the following year. It was a film about survival and strength disguised as a pop star documentary, themes she’d later dive deeper into on 2020’s “Chromatica.”
Though “Chromatica” was a record that sounded bright and colorful, filled with upbeat house and electronic pop music, its lyrics were deceptively gloomy, with songs about antipsychotics and relentless trauma loops. It had moments of hope, too, but by and large, “Chromatica” was about learning to accept and live with life’s agony. Shortly before the album was released, Gaga met Michael Polansky, a tech entrepreneur whom she fell head over heels for. The two have been together since, and Gaga partly credits Polansky, who proposed to her last year, for pulling her out of the doldrums. During the “Mayhem” rollout, Gaga has spoken about him with utter reverence, saying he’s been a pivotal part of her creative resurgence and newfound mindset. Gaga gushed in a “Vogue” cover story late last year, “The missing piece was having real love.”
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From its title alone, “Mayhem” may not have seemed like a record about finding your soulmate. But true to its name, “Mayhem” is chaotic, like rapturous love so often is. The album zigs just when you think it will zag. As soon as you think you’ve figured it out, Gaga heads in another direction entirely. It’s her first album since “Artpop” to move so freely, relieved of the palatable polish of “Joanne” and “Chromatica.” Here, Gaga sways between all of her artistic selves, excitedly dipping into the club kid funk of her early demos like “Retro Physical” and “Dirty Ice Cream.” On “Garden of Eden,” she reworks one of these unreleased songs to make a throwback sound modern, with a hook as instantly catchy and tempting as the poison apple its title evokes. It’s a pivot from the thrashing “Disease” or the quintessentially Gaga second single “Abracadabra” that precede it on the album, portending a record that asks fans to shed their preconceived notions and follow Gaga down the road to love she sang about 14 years ago.
“Perfect Celebrity” further smashes expectations, going full-tilt Hole and Nine Inch Nails for one of the most electrifying commentaries on her own fame she’s ever released (and there are many). She’s growling and screaming, telling the listener, “Tap on my veins and suck on my diamond blood / Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high.” In the next line, she includes a bit of fan service. “Sit in the front row, watch the princess die,” she commands, referencing a monster-favorite unreleased song of the same name.
But the through-line of “Mayhem” is love. Even on those abrasive cuts like “Disease” and “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga contends with herself, analyzing and intellectualizing where Gaga ends and Stefani Germanotta begins. “I’ve become a notorious being / Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling,” she sings in the latter cut. She conjures a clear image of a phantom self that Gaga can switch between at will. But ultimately, she’s wondering whether there’s a point in making that switch these days. She’s always been Stefani and Gaga, moving between each person as the music progresses. They are two parts of one mind, no less her at any moment, despite what some critics might see as inauthenticity. These are lipstick-strewn, bloodstained, gnashing middle fingers to anyone — including herself — who thinks the coexistence of her dual personas is impossible.
Artists often become so fascinated by their own torment that it becomes hard to accept that you can make great art without suffering. But with “Mayhem,” Gaga has successfully done just that.
Once she’s worked through some existentialism, Gaga allows her heart to open. Centerpiece tracks “Vanish Into You,” “Killah” and “Zombieboy” are three major highlights, each with their own flavor of intense desire. “Vanish Into You” is a sweet, soaring song about the heartache of loving someone so much you wish you could become part of them, even when they’re no longer around. “Killah” and “Zombieboy,” however, throb with funk grooves so nasty and pulsating that they wouldn’t be out of place on a Prince record. This isn’t lovelorn yearning, this is pure, unfettered horniness — and it’s infectious. “Zombieboy” is an instant Gaga all-timer; think of it like the woman who made “Monster” doing a disco-tinged Halloween novelty song about closing down the bar with the person you love most in this world. In simple terms: It’s brilliant, classic Gaga for a new age.
The latter half of the album slows things down for a handful of tracks more expressly about love and all the confusion it causes, not always to such satisfying results. “How Bad Do U Want Me” sounds like it would be popular in the alternate universe where Gaga’s fictional “A Star is Born” pop star Ally Maine exists. Far brighter is “LoveDrug,” a top-down-on-the-desert-highway '80s firecracker where Gaga uses her vocal prowess to an appropriately intoxicating effect. “Shadow of a Man” is a sensational, high-energy track about making your own way in a male-dominated industry, elbowing through chauvinism with a hook stronger than anything any male pop singer has put out since Justin Timberlake’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds.”
But even at her most indignant, Gaga finds stable footing in the softness of her romance. The penultimate track, a love ballad called “Blade of Grass,” is expressly dedicated to Polansky. It sounds very little like “Disease,” yet it exists in the same universe. Like “Disease,” it’s a song about feeling certain that you have all you need, even if everything else were to fall away. Whereas the Gaga of recent years might’ve sang “Blade of Grass” from a fearful perspective, cautious of losing the most important person in her life, the reinvigorated Gaga — the one who bolted back to life on the hood of the car in the “Disease” video — has no such worries.
On “Mayhem,” Gaga writes from a place of confidence she hadn’t previously tapped. Her assurance, restored through love, allows her to escape the fear and the pain that tortured her last few works. Shortly after the “Disease” video was released, I wrote that Gaga was forging her most interesting work in years by examining the fire instead of plunging into it, which holds for the rest of the album. Artists often become so fascinated by their own torment that it becomes hard to accept that you can make great art without suffering. But with “Mayhem,” Gaga has successfully done just that.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly ahead of the album’s release, Gaga said that she hoped her fans would see her happiness. “I know I’m not a role model for everyone,” she began. “But I hope to be an example that you can be a deeply artistic person and we don’t have to romanticize torture.” On “Mayhem,” Gaga has produced her best album in over a decade by distancing herself from those years of misery while accepting that they are very real. Now, she’s an observer, able to see all of her past selves and the ones who might exist in the future, from a higher, more enlightened ground. At that altitude, Gaga has finally found a place where there are no more tears to cry.
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