7 March 2025

On Mayhem, Lady Gaga makes a chaotic return to form

The singer’s new album attempts to recapture the intense art-project pop of her early records.

Photo by Frank Lebon

A male friend interviewed Lady Gaga in 2012, and she got completely nude while they talked, sitting under a fine piece of netting. It was a different era. Gaga, like an old-fashioned popstar, was both in control and a slave to the machine.

I’ll forever recall the excitement that greeted the woman who’d come to save recorded music. Back then, the industry was still capable of Barnum & Bailey press stunts. That same year, Rihanna flew 150 journalists around Europe on a private plane. That’s all changed, of course. The press allocation for Sabrina Carpenter’s current tour was revoked – because she doesn’t need reviews. Fans do the job far better!

A few months ago, I came across a concert film of Gaga at LA’s Dodger Stadium in 2022. I thought: “Wow, is she still going? She’s rather good, isn’t she?” It felt under the radar – a brilliant performer, thumping away at the piano like Billy Joel, at the top of her game, but no longer at the centre of the cultural conversation. The Little Monsters, her fans, were still there. They’d just grown up a bit.

Gaga’s turn to Hollywood in 2018 – her first role was as Barbra Streisand – gave the impression that she had landed on the face of pop, kicked up the dust, then got out to “keep herself interested”. Yet I’ve wondered whether she went into acting because she was musically stuck. Her last film, Joker: Folie à Deux, flopped, along with the album she’d written to accompany it. A return to form was announced with a new album, Mayhem. For someone so musical, and so willing to take aesthetic risks, it’s strange that she doesn’t take true musical risks – instead doing jazz records with Tony Bennett.

Gaga’s influence was never really about the music, which funnelled obvious rock tunes through a brash maxi-pop filter. Instead, it lay in her presentation of herself as an evolving art project – one that, crucially, appeared to show her working. Long before anyone else, she cultivated her fanbase as an exclusive club, harking back to the earliest days of pop fandom, while adapting to the internet age. Gaga’s vulnerability was theirs – an ingenious process of mirroring, while her own problems remained abstract. Fans were largely queer, while she is not. She worked with the alter ego. This is pop now – take Chappell Roan and Charli XCX.

She may have invented the model of the modern female pop star, but creatively Gaga’s legacy is less certain. She has an almost academically informed sense of the pop aesthetic, but her weakness lies in clarity. When I think of her, I think of a craven character with wild eye makeup and big black nails: but who, or what, is that? The eras are not defined – in her music videos, there’s a flood of ideas but little through-line – very ADHD, which might be why she resonated so well with the first Gen Zs.

She is an overthinker, yet there is little integrity to the imagery, despite the fact it is all so clearly profound and personal to her. A little like Galliano: brilliant, talented, spectacular – but less hot on real meaning. She has been an intense and chaotic proposition from the beginning.

This chaos is the starting point for Mayhem. The struggles of returning to form are expressed through the metaphor of looking in a shattered mirror – that’s the album cover, black and white like The Fame Monster. Things are different for Gaga in 2025. She is engaged to a venture capitalist, who co-wrote some of these songs, and likes to bring his laptop into the studio to work on his numbers while she sits at the mixing desk. She is very “blessed” – my shorthand for musical celebrities, generally American, who have ascended to a cloud of gratitude about their place in life, and are almost impossible to get a sense of. In an interview with Elle in January, Gaga spoke of the darkness and the pain she channelled into this album, all of it swirling around the rescuing vortex of love. But there was no sense of what this darkness is – because this was a 2025 pop interview, and so conducted by a superfan. (Popstars won the press.) Yet this disconnect between the darkness and the details has always been there.

In 2021 Gaga revealed that she had been raped at 19 by a producer – one who impregnated her and whom she had to continue to work with. She said she would never reveal his name. She keeps her traumas in the abstract, like the celebrities of the past. And yet, you can still see her personality – in the attention to detail, the deep sincerity. She holds on to everything tightly, because without it, she might not exist.

I asked a gay friend about Gaga’s relevance. “If Gaga didn’t have the Hollywood stuff, she would be Katy Perry,” he told me. “Perry has lost the gays. Gaga is essentially catering to the gays, but she should note that we are not guaranteed!” New track “Abracadabra”, the second single from Mayhem, was a sigh of relief, he added: “but honestly could have been AI-generated.”

But if Mayhem is AI-generated, then it was a pretty brilliant bot at work. The new record is an adrenaline bolt – physically exciting from the first fuzzy industrial thump, an onslaught of dancefloor, heavy-heavy leg-jiggers full of what I like to think of as the “Gaga melody”. In an age of multiple co-writers, she is one of the few modern pop stars with a recognisable melodic thumbprint. And we can all identify it – the limited but highly effective minor-key melodies that swirl eastward, or at least to the Spain of mid-eighties Madonna (the man who co-wrote “Senorita” and” Havana” is on some of these songs). This album says, “This is what I do best,” down to the nod – one assumes it is conscious – to the tune of “Bad Romance” in “Blade of Grass”.

It’s smart to have kept it to one colour – one avalanche of the stuff that made her, and made others in her path. I love the component parts: the sense-shifting metallic buzzes, the crunching cogs of the music. The maximalist production doesn’t seem dated because it has evolved through the knowing presentations of hyperpop and beyond – it’s still with us, a musical mom jean. The record is frontloaded with her classic sound but veers into a display of what she can do: Prince (“Killah”), Chic (“Zombieboy”) – I do wonder, who else can so effortlessly turn out these energetic musical facsimiles, apart from Bruno Mars, who duets on “Die With A Smile”?

Only “How Bad Do U Want Me” sounds weak. It’s about chasing boys and could be sung by anyone from Perry to Avril Lavigne. Gaga, you realise, doesn’t really chase boys. Her songs are about a relationship with love, or desire – but not people. Maybe we don’t want to see the process as much as we thought we did. Maybe Gaga always held the boundary between audience and artist – one that those who followed in her wake are struggling to keep.

Albums are funny things now: pleas for relevance, updated CVs, absorbed in record time by journalists on the morning of release. A quick take on “whether she’s still got it or not”. What you think of this one depends on what you think of Lady Gaga. There’s so much riding on it. No room for error. It says: This is me. This is what I can do. And I care desperately. It’s a success, and it’s not entirely confident – but show me an artist who is.

“Mayhem” is out now on Interscope

[See also: Severance is laughing at you]