Lady Gaga’s seventh studio album Mayhem has arrived after months of fanfare following the release of the much-hyped singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra” and the chart-topping Bruno Mars collab “Die With a Smile.” The seemingly darker avant-garde direction the Grammy winner appeared to be heading signaled for many fans a return to the unique Gaga sounds that characterized peerless projects like The Fame Monster and Artpop. With Mayhem, Gaga synthesizes elements from every one of her past projects and brings them into 2025 to create something entirely fresh in today’s constantly changing pop landscape.
In the lead-up to the album’s release, Gaga teased that the sonically disparate “Die With a Smile” and “Disease” being on the album together wasn’t a flaw but a feature of the wide-reaching project. The Oscar honoree harkens back to the dance-pop fun of past projects like The Fame with “Garden of Eden” and Chromatica with “Shadow of a Man” and invites fans in to her personal thoughts on the defiantly punk “Perfect Celebrity” and emotionally charged ballads “The Beast” and “Blade of Grass,” each track avoiding the stale traps that can easily plague such songs.
When speaking to Zane Lowe about how Mayhem all came together, Gaga explained that it isn’t—and for her, has never—been about chasing trends or making certain musical choices because they’re popular at the moment.
“Mayhem was made off of inspiration of loving artists, music producers, and sound[s] that I’ve been studying for at least a decade,” she said. “Even though Mayhem has my DNA in it, it also doesn’t sound the way that The Fame Monster did or the way that The Fame did.”
Because that approach isn’t new, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Mayhem came about in the same way.
“Through my way of thinking of music as being cross-genre, being able to combine lots of different things at the same time, that is who I am as a musician and I’ve always been that way, and that is what Mayhem is all about,” she said. “It’s the mayhem of being a nonlinear artist, and with this album embracing that about myself instead of being like ‘Okay, I have to fit it into this one thing.’”
Time will tell if Gaga takes the Mayhem on the road with a tour later this year.
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