Even throughout Lady Gaga’s requisite ups and downs as a singer, songwriter and actress (the less said about last year’s “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the better), the 38-year-old New Yorker born Stefani Germanotta has remained imperially famous for so long, it can be difficult to recall the subversive thrill of her initial rise.
When she ascended to superstardom in 2009, Gaga was an unabashed striver of a downtown club kid who cut her crowd-pleasing electro-pop with a deadpan, Warholian affect and an old-fashioned sense of musical showmanship. Whether dressed like an alien, an evil monarch or a butcher shop’s display window, she reveled in artifice and rewrote the script for the female pop star, reimagining sexuality as something weirder and more expansive — for both herself and her fervent fan base — than it had been in the Britney-and-Christina era. She was a welcome shock to pop’s system in the risk-averse late aughts — a romanticized era she mines for self-mythologizing nostalgia on her emphatic new album, “Mayhem.”
“Mayhem” is a bright, shiny and thoroughly sleek pop record, produced by Gaga, the rock-star whisperer Andrew Watt and the Max Martin protégé Cirkut. Even at its dirtiest — the digital grunge of “Perfect Celebrity,” the slithering liquid funk of “Killah” — every sound is etched in clean, bold lines.
It’s considerably sharper than her previous two pop solo efforts, the tepid 2016 quasi-country album, “Joanne,” and her unfortunately timed 2020 return to the dance floor, “Chromatica,” a mixed bag that now sounds overly dated thanks to its embrace of pop’s then-trendy obsession with sound-alike house samples and beats. (Gaga recently admitted in a New York Times Magazine interview that she wasn’t operating at her highest level in the “Chromatica” era: “I was in a really dark place,” she said, “and I wouldn’t say I made my best music during that time.”)
But over the past few months, Gaga has stoked anticipation for her sixth pop LP with a wildly successful (if relatively anodyne), chart-topping Bruno Mars duet, “Die With a Smile,” and two of her hardest-hitting singles in a decade: the deliciously warped “Disease,” a churning, industrial pop dirge that highlights Nine Inch Nails as an influence on this album, and “Abracadabra,” a latex-tight dance-floor incantation with a chorus that finds her speaking in tongues like the high priestess of her own self-referential religion: “Abracadabra, amor ooh na na / Abracadabra morta ooh Gaga.” It is, of course, an expertly executed sequel to her 2009 smash “Bad Romance,” just as the following track, the skronky, gloriously hedonistic “Garden of Eden” plays out like an even more vivid return to the club she visited on her first hit, “Just Dance.”
Throughout its 14 tracks, “Mayhem” dances on the line between clever self-referentiality and less inspired rehashing. The corrosive “Perfect Celebrity” is a sonic highlight that nonetheless butts up against the album’s thematic and lyrical limitations, returning to one of her favorite, and now tired, topics: the damage inflicted by fame. Is the opening line — “I’m made of plastic like a human doll” — a winking throwback to the “Chromatica” track “Plastic Doll,” or a bit of recycled imagery?
For the first time since her semi-misunderstood 2013 bacchanal “Artpop,” Lady Gaga commits to the clenched-fist conviction and over-the-top excess that made her a star in the first place. She sounds locked in all throughout “Mayhem,” even during its most middling and questionable material, which begins around the eighth track and carries through the second half. The midtempo “LoveDrug” gets lost in lyrical clichés, while the slow-crawling electro ballad “The Beast” feels written expressly for placement in the trailer of an instantly forgettable direct-to-streaming erotic thriller (though Gaga sings the heck out of it just the same).
Still, her riskier moves usually pay off. “Killah,” an outré collaboration with the French D.J. and producer Gesaffelstein, stretches a sex-is-death metaphor to truly absurd extremes, but Gaga, vamping like an even more cartoonish version of David Bowie circa “Young Americans,” gives the song a goofy urgency that’s hard to resist.
While there’s a lot of superficial gore and carnage on “Mayhem” — and much of it is enjoyably campy, like the lite-disco “Hollaback Girl” throwback “Zombieboy” — the album’s underlying conflicts are internal. In the elaborately choreographed video for “Abracadabra,” two opposing Gagas wrestle for control; on the wrenching “How Bad Do U Want Me,” the other woman is a shadow self.
That song, a deliriously catchy synth-pop anthem that draws such clear inspiration from Taylor Swift that some fans thought she was an uncredited backing singer on the track (she isn’t), is the most obviously derivative moment on “Mayhem” — and also one of the best and most fascinating.
Centered around a percolating interpolation of Yaz’s 1982 new-wave classic “Only You,” Gaga’s soaring, impassioned vocal gives the digitized arrangement a jolt of humanity. “How Bad Do U Want Me” stands out for sounding relatively au courant, considering that the rest of the album draws on the sounds of pop’s recent past or timeless legends (Bowie, Prince and Michael Jackson are all touchstones). But it also displays a sense of old-school vocal prowess that elevates Gaga above her newest peers.
In the time since Gaga’s most dominant influence, and under Swift’s powerful star, pop music has become considerably chattier, looser and more performatively confessional. Even artists who present themselves in opposition to Swift’s aesthetics have been transformed by them: see Charli XCX’s 2024 sensation “Brat” (like “Mayhem,” fueled by nostalgia for the 2000s), which is filled with shrugging, run-on lyrics that feel honest and raw in a way that continues to elude Lady Gaga. When it comes to expressing her demons or desires, Gaga would still rather reach for an overwritten monster metaphor. Subtlety, she reminds us throughout the maximalist spectacle of “Mayhem,” has never been her love language, and she can only convincingly play the girl next door if you happen to live on the dark side of Mars.
But that is also what makes “Mayhem” feel like a refreshing anomaly. In recent years, pop vocalists have also become quieter, breathier and more restrained — which in some cases is a polite way of saying less talented. In a world of so-called lowercase pop, Gaga still has the caps-lock on in a bold, 96-point font, like she did in 2009. Throughout the album, she belts to the heavens and hits her marks with precision and flair, reminding her peers what a capital-E entertainer sounds like. If that makes her old-fashioned, so be it — sometimes there’s a benefit to sounding a little behind the times.
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