An entertainer for the ages, Lady Gaga has nothing left to prove. She could sell out stadiums and win another Oscar in a heartbeat. She could host Saturday Night Live and serve as the musical guest — as she did last weekend — while redefining fashion trends on red carpets across the globe. She could never again release a single and still remain among the most prominent artists of our time.
But the woman I’ve begun to affectionately call “mother,” the club queen and pop supernova, knew her fans had a craving for chaos. Luckily, that came in the form of an album called “Mayhem.”
Her first album since 2020’s “Chromatica,” “Mayhem” revisits Gaga’s classic synth-pop roots.
The frenetic “Disease,” the album’s opener released first as a single on Oct. 25, offers an earworm. In her chorus, “I could play the doctor / I can cure your disease,” she presents a track heavily reminiscent of earlier hits like “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance” through her baseline and chord progressions.
Gaga announced her second single “Abracadabra” in an advertisement at the 2025 Grammys. Her choreographic ingenuity shone through in the ad, but what was most enthralling was her repetition of the titular spell. “Abracadabra” becomes such a hard-hitting incantation that I can hardly wait for the online conspiracy theorists to inevitably call it satanic.
Perhaps the most compelling song on the album is “Perfect Celebrity,” which boldly criticizes the pressures of the spotlight.
“I’m made of plastic like a human doll,” Gaga sings in the track’s opening verse, bringing to mind the censure she faced after donning a dress of raw beef at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.
“You love to hate me” is a repetitive phrase in the song, and she doles it out generously at the song’s conclusion. The song’s self-critical nature (“Rip of my face in this photograph / You make me money I’ll make you laugh”) could make any listener with a shred of a soul feel protective over the artist.
Another song that is quintessentially Gaga is “Don’t Call Tonight.” In the arrestingly sobering first verse, Gaga frames herself as a lover “addicted to your lies.” Nonetheless, the track is not a statement of self-pity. As she sings at the onset, “I need to cry to feel alive.” “Don’t Call Tonight” evolves into a pulsing club track, which crescendos into a bridge that is deftly interwoven with her chorus.
Despite being an entity unto itself, the Grammy Award-winning and “Mayhem” closer “Die With a Smile” is undoubtedly the album’s strongest track. Given its powerful electric guitar and soulful dreambeat, the song would have become a hit even without the vocal prowess of Gaga and Bruno Mars, who serves his signature belt and ethereal falsetto.
If the lyrics “If the party was over and our time on our earth was through / I’d wanna hold you just for awhile / And die with a smile,” are not the most heart-warmingly romantic in the world, I’m starved for any lyrics that measure up.
“Mayhem” isn’t merely an album, but a distinguished body of work that I believe will be applauded well beyond this year. Despite being her first album in five years, the album is hardly a comeback: Lady Gaga hasn’t gone anywhere, and the indelible imprint she has made on the music industry will outlast us all.
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