Lady Gaga has never been a stranger to mayhem. What has always driven her artistry is a desire to merge opposing concepts, bridging the gap between artifice and authenticity, or art and pop.
At times, these contradictions threatened to overwhelm her. Take ARTPOP (2013), for example, which remains a cautionary tale on the limitations of shock value, whether that meant collaborating with R. Kelly or being puked on during a performance. Overexposure, coupled with the album’s lukewarm commercial and critical reception, led to what felt like a lost decade for Gaga. Her career often seemed aimless, with forays into jazz or acting coming across more as attempts to push aside the Lady Gaga project rather than push it forward.
Even on her subsequent major albums, 2016’s Joanne and 2020’s Chromatica, her artistry felt particularly artificial, even by Lady Gaga standards. Though both albums were crafted with the intent of healing grief and inner turmoil, the concepts of cosplaying as her late aunt or exploring alien planets gave her work a sense of disconnection; these projects felt like attempts to skirt around her inner demons rather than confront them head-on. Gaga was still performing, but it had never felt more stiff.
This is not the case with Mayhem, Lady Gaga’s seventh, and possibly best, album. The cracks in her persona are still visible, but this time, they are not shoddily plastered over with pink cowboy hats or power ranger costumes. Instead, they are put fully on display, as seen in cracked glass on the album cover. Mayhem is an unflinching exploration of identity, chaos, and rebirth, marking a bold new chapter in Gaga’s career.
The opening track and lead single, Disease, sets the tone for the record. Over an industrial instrumental, Gaga confronts her inner demons, singing about healing the "poison on the inside." The accompanying music video features her being pursued by her own doppelgänger, establishing a duality of monster and saviour that runs throughout the album.
Throughout the album, Lady Gaga refuses to be just one thing. This instability in identity can be seen in Zombieboy, in which she expresses a desire for her lover’s "zombie bite" over a slick disco beat, embracing change and mutation. On Perfect Celebrity, she explores her own split identity between Stefani Germanotta the civilian and Lady Gaga the celebrity, referring to the latter as "my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling." While the Gaga of 2013 may have been overwhelmed in trying to embody both Jeff Koons and Sandro Botticelli, this rebooted Gaga handles this hypostatic union with ease. Even on tracks like Killah, with its funky Prince-inspired guitar riffs, or the Michael Jackson inspired Shadow of a Man, and even the Taylor Swift-esque How Bad Do U Want Me, Lady Gaga never loses herself in the process.
In this way, Mayhem feels like a re-debut for Gaga, a motif that’s even implied on the third track, Garden of Eden, in which she reimagines the biblical origin story for sin as a nightclub. Here, Gaga comes across like a fresh artist, steered by her creativity rather than trying to steer it. The resulting chaos is evident in the album’s genre-spanning sound, from dark pop to disco to piano ballads. While it may lead her down familiar roads as seen in the similarities between Abracadabra and Bad Romance, she approaches them with a newfound clarity in perspective; instead of hiding from The Fame Monster, she confronts it head-on. Lady Gaga’s Mayhem is simultaneously raw and deliberate and it might just be the best pop album of 2025.
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