The Lady Gaga you loved and missed returns with pop ‘Mayhem’

NEW YORK (AP):

She hath returned: A new Lady Gaga, like the old Lady Gaga, but a different Lady Gaga.

Mayhem, released Friday, is a satisfying full-length project of big pop material, both a return to her roots and a hard press on the gas pedal.

Her 2008 debut The Fame introduced a new generation to the addictive properties of expertly crafted electropop. The Fame Monster a year later cemented her position as a modern great, a saviour of theatrical pop that once recalled Madonna and now serves as a reminder that big belts are cinema. Then came the genre explorations of Born This Way, Artpop, Joanne (arriving years before pop would go country — she has long been prescient), and 2020’s Chromatica.

Half a decade later, is the world ready again for her club anthems? Or is Mayhem an attempt to revitalise a big pop sound left behind in the streaming era? Can an artiste return home without playing some parody of themselves?

The answer, of course, is up to the listener. Some will hear Abracadabra as life-affirming dance music. Others will press play on Killah and baulk at its Gesaffelstein-aided sound. They might read the earworm Disease as a song that too easily recalls the mid-2010s of her heyday, but to do so would strip it of stadium-sized pleasures. It is a great song, a familiar song, a return to a classic Gaga. (And for what it is worth, there’s a lot more energy there than in the Grammy-winning power ballad Die with a Smile, her collaboration with Bruno Mars.)

The truth is, Gaga has reclaimed her early dark-pop sensibilities and ushered them into her 2025 reality across Mayhem. It manifests in a few ways, most prominently in her delivery. Lady Gaga sounds like she is having fun here, from the modular Moog of the ballad fake-out Vanish Into You and the Bad Romance Easter egg of Garden of Eden, to the springy synth of Perfect Celebrity, which furthers Gaga’s quest to use fame to question fame’s legitimacy. Now that is timeless pop meta-commentary.

Autonomy was top of mind for Gaga on Mayhem, and it’s yielded great results. “Something that was really important to me on this was really taking from myself my own inventions,” she told AP in a recent interview. “I was the creator. This was my work. It was just not a character I was playing. It was something that I made.”

Mayhem will sound familiar to Gaga listeners, there’s no doubt about that. But they will hear an evolved version — not an easy play at nostalgia, nor an artiste appeasing contemporary trends. It is Gaga staying true to herself, as she has been known to do.