Lady Gaga is back. If that sentence alone doesn’t make you feel something, let me elaborate: Lady Gaga is back. Her new album, Mayhem, her first in five years, is not only a return to music (following movie leading roles in 2021’s House of Gucci and 2024’s Joker: Folie à Deux) but a blistering return to classic form: it’s twisted, it’s brash, it’s camp, and, more than 15 years since the avant-garde pop of her debut album The Fame, it’s still pushing boundaries.
Gaga is a shapeshifter: she made it very clear early on that, meat dress or not, her every move was part of the art. It makes sense that her career, which began with the thumping beats of “Poker Face” and “Just Dance”, accompanied by wacky outfits that nobody knew what to make of, developed into something richly varied, with Gaga starring in 2018’s A Star is Born, releasing the stripped-back soft-rock album Joanne, collaborating with the US jazz star Tony Bennett and generally transforming from the biggest freak in pop to an EGOT-worthy all-rounder.
Her range is commendable, her vocal ageing like fine wine, her piano skills impressive – but it’s refreshing to have the freak back, in all her gender-bending, pleather-wearing, fake-blood spewing glory. Mayhem’s first two songs are the two singles, “Disease” and “Abracadabra” – both of which, with their Eurodance feel, high-drama concepts and screamable choruses, take us right back to the screeches of late 2000s dance floors.
Gaga has always been avant-garde (Photo by: Theo Wargo/Peacock via Getty)Where 2020’s Chromatica was a very Covid concept album about health and healing, Mayhem leans into a variety of themes. There’s the bacchanal party of “Garden of Eden”, where Gaga is “falling over in my nine-inch heels”, finding one-night lovers. There’s the social commentary of “Perfect Celebrity”, where she comments on her public role: “I’m made of plastic like a human doll / You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all.” Throughout, perhaps predictably, there is plenty of love, plenty of sexual tension, plenty of “feel the beat”s.
Most consistently there is death, gore and violence – the perverse, high-stakes drama that makes Gaga so exciting, and her style so operatic. On “Disease”: “Screamin’ for me baby / Like you’re gonna die”. On the fevered, slow “Vanish into You”: “When I die / Can I vanish into you”. On “Killah”, “You gonna die tonight”, and on closer “Die with a Smile”, a classic ballad featuring Bruno Mars, we go full apocalypse: “If the world was ending I’d wanna be next to you.”
Gaga’s voice is ageing like fine wine (Photo: Frank Le Bon)square POP MUSIC
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Read MoreMayhem is great musically, too, dominated by that classic synthy, bassy sound – Queen-meets-Madonna-meets-Basshunter-meets-The-Prodigy. But the album’s highlights are where she pushes herself beyond the failsafe – “Killah” is a glorious Prince-like 80s jam with a husky, understated vocal and outrageously funky guitars. “Zombieboy” is pure old-school disco-house, a creative, modern tribute to a genre with a great big crescendo of a bridge.
Once again she’s showing us her ability to innovate and adapt within the musical parameters she invented; after several more full-on, car-karaoke dance-pop chuggers, she switches to Star-is-Born songstress for her final two songs, including the Bruno Mars number, as if to show us that she can still do it, she’s just choosing not to.
In a way, this is an album of few surprises. But that’s its brilliance – not only a return to form but a reminder that the worlds Lady Gaga has created will always exist.
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