On March 7th, pop artist Lady Gaga released “Mayhem,” following her Bruno Mars collaboration with “Die With a Smile,” the longest-running No. 1 hit on Spotify’s daily global chart. “Die With a Smile” won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at this year’s Grammy Awards and significantly boosted Gaga’s streaming numbers, placing her as the second most-streamed artist on Spotify currently.
Did this signal Gaga’s resurgence in the contemporary music scene? Amidst fleeting artists and momentary hits, can a pop icon from the early 2010s rise again after a Razzie’s “Worst Actress” nomination and an unsuccessful soundtrack album? “Mayhem” was released as an answer.
Only a few songs come to mind when I hear campy lyrics and nonsense syllables over electropop, synth-driven harmonies and theatrical vocals — all of them Gaga’s classic hits. This was the style that characterized the artist’s early music and made her indistinguishable from her contemporary pop singers. As hinted by the singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” “Mayhem” was set to bring back the musical style of “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster,” the records that cemented her stardom back in 2009.
“The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” stated Gaga in her album announcement.
“I did not want to turn it into anything artificial, I really wanted to allow myself to just follow the music,” Gaga said in an interview with Billboard. “By doing that, it started to slowly remind me of my earlier work.”
I approached “Mayhem” expecting to find her early signature that I couldn’t find in her latest albums. After first listening to the album, I could definitely grasp Gaga’s ideas. For example, when I first heard “Shadow Of A Man” and “Don’t Call Tonight,” I couldn’t help but sing “The Fame Monster” hits “Telephone” and “Paparazzi” over them, respectively.
“Only a few songs come to mind when I hear campy lyrics and nonsense syllables over electropop, synth-driven harmonies and theatrical vocals — all of them Gaga’s classic hits.“
I was disappointed to find out that this album focuses so much on recreating the imagery and sounds of “The Fame” and “The Fame Monster” but abandons Gaga’s introspective and vulnerable themes.
Gaga compared “Mayhem” to “one night out” clubbing, and that’s precisely the feeling we get while listening to the album from beginning to end. We take over the dancefloor with “Disease” and live it up with “Abracadabra.” However, by the time we reach the fifth track, “Vanish Into You,” the album starts to feel endless and monotonous; we lose interest and step aside, no longer motivated to reconnect with its euphoric energy. Certain tracks reignite our energy at times, until the true nostalgic moment arrives with “Die With a Smile,” the final song, evoking the bittersweet end of a night out with friends.
Out of the 14 songs on “Mayhem,” seven illustrate scenarios of midnight desire: “Disease,” “Abracadabra,” “Killah,” “Zombieboy,” “LoveDrug,” “The Beast” and arguably, “How Bad Do You Want Me.”
“We’re about to be up all night, waking up a zombie / so put your paws all over me, you zombie-boy,” Gaga sings in “Zombieboy” — and essentially that’s the message of most songs on the album: dancing until dawn. The lyrics reveal little about Gaga herself; they feel generic and empty.
Think of the title tracks as metaphors for seducing a guy at a party: you’re diseased, the victim of an abracadabric spell, a zombie, a love drug, a beast. She wants you and she’ll take you to the Garden of Eden. That, in essence, is Lady Gaga’s album.
Some songs do showcase Gaga’s natural voice. The fan favorite track “Perfect Celebrity” shows self-reflectiveness, inspired by 90s alternative rock. It addresses the struggles of fame: “Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceilin’ / Now, can’t get me down / You love to hate me / I’m the perfect celebrity.”
“Shadow Of A Man” also explores her experience as a female artist; lyrics like “I don’t wanna be the one to fall on the knife / To come alive” refer to the challenge of standing out in the music industry among her male predecessors and inspirations.
Profit-wise, “Mayhem” became her 7th No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and represented the biggest weekly sales sum for a female album this year. This commercial triumph demonstrated the 38-year-old singer winning over ageism, a common issue faced by music artists past their twenties.
“Even though the world might consider a woman in her late thirties old for a pop star, which is insane, I promise that I’m just getting warmed up,” she said, receiving the Innovator Award at the 2025 iHeartRadio Music Awards.
As Billboard editor Andrew Unterberger suggested, the album is a strong reclamation of Gaga’s pop legacy and confirms that she still has a long journey ahead in the music industry.
Ultimately, it’s clear Gaga paid tribute to her previous discography as the anti-aging recipe. In an interview with Elle, Gaga explained that the album’s title alluded to its chaos and her excitement in exploring imagery different from what she had done before.
Honestly, I couldn’t find that. I wish there had been more of this mayhem, that I could truly sense the chaos she describes, rather than the album’s shallowness and its monotonous rehashing of her early 2010s sound without any real depth.
Tomy Helman PO ’28 is a music columnist from Florida, Argentina. He’s interested in culture and politics and currently speaks Spanish, English, French, Indonesian and Italian.
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