- Lady Gaga released her new album, “Mayhem,” on Friday.
- Marketed as a return to her industrial-pop roots, the album is brighter and funkier than expected.
- Put in conversation, the album’s rollout and sequence suggest an intentional bait-and-switch by Gaga.
Lady Gaga promised “Mayhem,” and she delivered — just not in the way that fans and critics could’ve predicted.
Gaga’s new album, out Friday, was heavily marketed using avant-garde imagery, black-and-white aesthetics, throbbing beats, and phantasmic echoes of her previous eras. The two lead singles, “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” both earned comparisons to Gaga’s early provocative pop that made her queen of the freaks in the aughts, like “Alejandro” and “Bad Romance.”
Although Gaga insisted in interviews that “Mayhem” couldn’t be assigned a specific genre, the rollout had a clear identity nonetheless — suggesting a triumphant return to form for the woman lovingly known as “Mother Monster.”
Technically, Gaga released three songs from “Mayhem” ahead of the album: first came “Die With a Smile,” a romantic duet with Bruno Mars that has dominated Billboard’s global pop charts since last August. However, the song was originally assumed to be a stand-alone loosie, while “Disease” was marketed as the album’s official lead single.
In fact, many fans began to wonder how a schmaltzy song like “Die With a Smile” would fit into the album’s landscape — to the point where many questioned why it was included on the tracklist at all.
One of Gaga’s producers, Andrew Watt, was even asked to account for this discrepancy in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It was always intended for her album,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Now that “Mayhem” has finally arrived, I can only imagine how silly that question must’ve seemed to Watt.
‘Die With a Smile’ is not the outlier on the album — ‘Disease’ and ‘Abracadabra’ are
Where Gaga teased “a series of gothic dreams,” what actually takes shape is a woman jolting awake, the sun streaming through her windows. The vast majority of “Mayhem” is lively and melodic, undoubtedly ’80s-inspired, even funky at times.
That’s not to say Gaga isn’t going full pop-maximalist as fans hoped she would. It’s just not the limb-for-limb resurrection of “The Fame Monster” we were primed to expect.
Still, standout tracks like “Vanish Into You,” “Killah,” “Shadow of a Man,” and “How Bad Do U Want Me” suggest influences from David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift, particularly Swift’s own synth-pop heel-turn “1989.”
Although Swift didn’t have a hand in creating “Mayhem” like some fans were convinced she did, her savvy fingerprints are still visible on the album’s packaging.
Swift is an artist self-admittedly enamored with a bit of slick trickery: “Every bait and switch was a work of art,” she sings in the 2020 single “Willow.” Ahead of her newest album, for example, Swifties were prepared for a painstaking autopsy on her recently deceased six-year relationship, only for “The Tortured Poets Department” to exhume the fortnight-long love affair we’d mostly forgotten about.
Of course, the “Mayhem” rollout wasn’t all smokescreens and sleights of hand; “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart, are both on the album, after all. The promise of dark, pulsing pop is fulfilled, if only briefly.
The sequence of the tracklist also seems to mirror the album’s rollout. “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” placed at tracks one and two, set the stage. Next, we get “Garden of Eden” and “Perfect Celebrity,” which still cast Gaga as a brash electropop purveyor — but an air of change and transition, perhaps even of impatience, lurks just beneath the surface.
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The latter is especially instructive. Gaga taunts the audience (and herself) for expecting perfection, indestructibility, and an inoffensive brand of notoriety. “You love to hate me / I’m the perfect celebrity,” she sneers.
This is exactly the kind of satire that helped fashion Gaga’s persona (remember her performance of “Paparazzi” at the 2009 VMAs? How could you not?). But where Gaga was once game to play the part — to reflect our desires back to us, to “live for the applause,” in her own words — now she sounds angry. “Rip off my face in this photograph,” she instructs in the song’s chorus, symbolically condemning her own nostalgia bait.
Indeed, “Perfect Celebrity” is the last song of its kind on the album. After the old image of Gaga is sufficiently mangled, she stitches together a new one like she’s her own Dr. Frankenstein; the rest of the tracklist unspools with shimmering guitar riffs and bursts of color à la early MTV.
Gaga was 22 years old when she released “The Fame,” her debut album. Now, she’s 38, among many other things: a 13-time Grammy winner, an Oscar winner, an Emmy nominee, a style icon, a fiancée. Most importantly, she has said she’s “really happy.”
“I hope that I can maybe be an example that you can be a deeply artistic person and that we don’t have to romanticize torture,” Gaga told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month.
Maybe it’s embarrassing that we wanted Gaga to reembody the hungry girl who had just made “Just Dance” and “Poker Face,” the girl striving for a kind of success with unique, invasive consequences she couldn’t yet understand. The “return to form” narrative is very tempting but can also be infantilizing and restrictive.
After all, who wants to relive the torture of being 22 when many people are lonely, brand new to the strains of adulthood, and basically clueless? I’d rather have the space to grow.
Gaga knew this earlier than most. She has spent her entire career shape-shifting, rebelling, and rejecting the industry’s expectations. As “Mayhem” suggests, even down to its title, there is no form for her to return to — only more chaos to overcome and more art to create.
