Album Review: MAYHEM by Lady Gaga

A star is reborn with this exhilarating, high-energy riot of sound that amounts to her best album in years It's official: Lady Gaga is back, and she's brought the chaos with her. After a lacklustre detour through power ballads, jazz standards, and the mega-flop Joker sequel, her latest album is a reminder of the Gaga of old, while still fitting into today's messy post-Brat pop climate. Mayhem is an awesome return to form, and to the sound that made her a star.

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Gaga is good. Lady Gaga's entire career has attempted to answer one question- Who is Gaga? The question itself, divorced of any context, sounds tantalizing enough, but Stefani Germanotta has always made the ride intriguing, if not fun. Her earlier work declared "She's an icon!" with increasing confidence while the latter half has pleaded the inverse: "She's a human." The push-pull dynamic with where the target of her longing lies has created an adventurous, breathtaking career full of hits, but, outside of The Fame Monster, Gaga has always seemed to dangle the full picture just outside of the margins. Her latest, Mayhem, throws another tautological explanation -Gaga is Gaga.

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MAYHEM isn't bad though, and I want to stress that fact before I get into it. Lady Gaga has always delivered excellence in whatever music she puts her mind to, from jazz to bubblegum pop, from Americana to Broadway. This top standard and the high bar she's set for herself is what listeners now hold her to, and MAYHEM, while solid, lacks its very name by nature.

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When Lady Gaga released her single “Born This Way”, it felt like she was one of the leading figures in a sustainable social movement with legs and a firm future. An anthem for the LGBT community, the song spoke to a startlingly swift shift in our culture that saw people embrace gays, lesbians, bisexual people and trans folks. During the hope-driven Obama presidency, we saw remarkable strides in LGBT rights, including marriage equality and the end of DOMA, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, expansion of coverage of Federal hate crimes laws to apply to LGBT victims, as well as several executive orders and diplomatic work globally to address equality.

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A faraway look entered Lady Gaga's eyes near the end of a conversation I had with her in Santa Monica late last year. I'd asked the pop superstar, whose Las Vegas residency "Jazz & Piano" had recently concluded, whether she might revive the show at some point; the question led her to muse for a moment on her relationship to genre -- more specifically, on her reputation as an artist always eager to try her hand at a new one. "And to fall in love with it," she added.

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People never think of Gaga as cute. She's been otherworldly strange, or full-on to the point of threat, or, later on, rocking her pitch-perfect untouchable widescreen diva pose. She's always moved fast and kept her distance. But actual Gaga is cute. Especially now, parallel acting career long ….

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She's back. The build-up to 'Mayhem' has see Lady Gaga reiterate her commitment to pop music , grappling once more with the possibilities of being a chart alien, crushing competitors while setting boundaries alight. It couldn't have come at a more apt time for the world - dark forces linger ominously on the fringes of our daily lives, impinging on the spirit in the process.

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While it's a welcome and always entertaining aspect of her fashion, Lady Gaga has historically tended to overdress her art. Anyone who’s followed the arc of her career knows that she frames every era around a concept, maximizing — sometimes over-maximizing — whatever significance she gives it. Often, it works, like with the political flag-waving of “Born This Way,” or the journey towards healing on “Chromatica.” But it’s when she gets in her own way that her vision falters — last year’s “Harlequin,” for instance, was a stunning lesson in giving into impulse; “Artpop” assigned meaning where there wasn’t much of it.

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Her 2024 hit collaboration with Bruno Mars was, unfortunately, more of the same. Fans have eagerly awaited the pop star's seventh studio album, long dubbed LG7 by stan Twitter -- and for a while there, it seemed like it might just end up being another collection of jazz standards or covers. Then, last fall, she released the clanging electropop single "Disease," with the Old Gaga showing signs of life.

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Lady Gaga's seventh studio album, Mayhem, was--according to the singer herself--influenced heavily by industrial dance music, suggesting it would mark a return to the sound of her peak-era albums The Fame Monster and Born This Way. The set's lead single, "Disease," delivered on that promise, with a mechanical thrum and squelchy bassline with enough heft to support Gaga's characteristically bombastic performance. Aside from that track and follow-up "Abracadabra," however, Mayhem trades almost entirely in '80s synth-pop, especially in its middle stretch, from "Zombieboy," a tribute to Rick Genest (who appeared in the video for 2011's "Born This Way"), to the groovy, Bowie-esque "Killah.

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