Decidedly Lady Gaga

2010 was the year my parents splurged on the big cable package, giving us access to HBO, a DVR and music videos on-demand. I’d wake up early on weekends just so I could have an hour or two of uninterrupted viewing, because I didn’t grow up in a pop-minded or with-the-times household. Watching the first season of Glee with my mom was the closest I’d come, up until that point, to being “on-trend.” I didn’t know the words to Top 40 music but pretended to, slowly stepping out of the classic rock fascinations that had previously anchored my taste. Seeing Lady Gaga’s to-be-continued, Beyoncé-co-starring music video for “Telephone” for the first time ignited a pop fervor previously unexplored within me, and I remember watching it over and over. She was my Madonna, bloody and provocative and full of courage. And during that period, from 2009 until 2013, the people in my orbit were either Team Swift or Team Gaga. There was no overlap in my tiny, rural Ohio hometown. Like the division between Edward and Jacob synchronously unfurling, you had to pick a lane. In 2011, my middle school held a talent show just before summer break in May, and all the girls in my grade sang, lip-synced and duetted “You Belong With Me” while wearing cowboy hats and spurred boots.

But then, a girl two years my junior, Libby, performed an extravagant, hula-hoop rendition of “Born This Way”—fit with an humungous, ornate eggshell built from scratch. Needless to say, she took home first prize. The crowd was so enamored that a community-driven Facebook campaign to get Libby on Ellen started a day later, to no avail. If “Born This Way” could rouse such a pop-pilled ruckus in a historically conservative township, then perhaps Kurt Hummel’s decree about Lady Gaga in season one of Glee was, in fact, a state of the union address: “She’s only the biggest pop act to come along in decades. She’s boundary-pushing, the most theatrical performer of our generation.”

“All you can do is go with your authenticity and your heart when you’re working,” Gaga tells me over Zoom just weeks before the release of her seventh studio album, Mayhem. Her last official solo album, Chromatica, came out in May 2020, but we’ve heard from her quite a bit in those near-five years, thanks to remixes, soundtracks and ample time spent on the silver screen. Some artists resist the term “chameleon,” but there are only so many words in the English language that could really properly describe Gaga. In the last decade alone, she’s been an Academy Award-nominated actress, a jazz singer crooning with the late Tony Bennett and one of Hollywood’s marquee philanthropists. At the Grammys last month, she and Bruno Mars took the stage to accept the award for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. When Gaga spoke into the mic, she offered a gesture of love in the wake of the United States government’s ongoing attempts to oppress and shame the LGBTQIA+ community, fighting for the very people she not only fought for 15 years ago, but the people who vocally championed her music from the jump: “Trans people deserve love. The queer community deserves to be lifted up. Music is love.” We have always needed Lady Gaga, just as she’s always needed us.

After her Chromatica Ball tour ended in 2022, Gaga began working on new music, teasing her seventh album in doses by posting photos of herself in a recording studio on Instagram. Her fiancé Michael Polansky, whose name adorns the Zoom box Gaga is speaking to me from, told her to “lean in to the joy” of making a pop album after she completed the jazz-facing Harlequin, a companion album for her character in Joker: Folie à Deux. On her 38th birthday last March, Gaga posted online, “I am writing some of my best music in as long as I can remember.” Her discography is a fickle one; it features a game-changing debut (The Fame), one of the greatest albums of all time (The Fame Monster) and one of the most puzzling genre-swaps in recent memory (Joanne). Trying to wrap your head around her defiant mix of boldness and what-the-fuckery is a fool’s errand; Gaga’s oeuvre is a plentifulness best enjoyed without expectation.

What part of her career Gaga was referring to—the era her new batch of songs were already rivaling—remains a mystery. She hasn’t had a #1 hit song by herself in 14 years, but I’m not so sure that is an accolade she’s actively hunting down in 2025. And I don’t think we’re going to return to the era of her meat dress escapades, either. Perhaps she was talking about her post-Born This Way period, after she’d become a cultural mononym for good. In the three albums she released between 2013 and 2020, Gaga experimented with everything from EDM to Americana. The left turn of Joanne became the right turn of Chromatica. In the middle of that, she played a country singer named Ally—whose arc includes working at a drag bar, memorializing Édith Piaf and winning a Grammy Award for Best New Artist (an award Gaga herself was never nominated for)—in the fourth adaptation of William Wellman and Robert Caron’s A Star is Born. It’s been a minute since she’s lived in just one outfit for more than an album cycle.

But last August, the road towards LP7 became all the more paved for Gaga’s Little Monsters, as her duet with Mars, “Die With a Smile,” received critical airplay and, above all, flaunted the pop star’s longtime, seemingly-effortless ability to have perfect chemistry with her collaborators. Though it never popped off with the same magnitude as “Telephone,” “Die With a Smile” signaled that all was right in the Gaga camp once more, as it topped the Hot 100 chart for nearly all of January 2025, over six months after its initial release. “Disease” came later, in October, quickly evoking a reverie of EDM, electrpop and grunge—the latter no doubt a mark of influence from co-producer Andrew Watt, one of rock music’s most in-demand figures. (Watt’s influence in the last five years alone has been ecstatic, as he turned a Producer of the Year Grammy into the Rolling Stones’ best album in 30 years and a credit on Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter.)

At this year’s Grammys, a new Gaga song, “Abracadabra,” was played in its entirety during a commercial break. Its choreographed dance-pop felt familiarly intricate, stepping away from the cyberpunk-inspired, house-influenced, conceptual stylings of Chromatica and into a rigorously theatric, widescreen campiness not felt since, hell, “Applause” or “The Edge of Glory.” After the performance ended, “nostalgic” became the word of the day, sparked by “Abracadabra”’s flickers of Born This Way-era Gaga. “How do you manage the expectations of surprise so far into your career?” I ask her, considering the lack of shock-value fashion a song like “Abracadabra” wears after 15 years of gagged-up eclecticism. Candidly, she admits, “I’m not sure.” She cites the “stuttery pop gibberish” of “Bad Romance” as a possible parallel, but retracts it quickly. “I wasn’t trying to recreate something else. It’s what I was hearing, and it’s what I wanted to make. And I took a chance with it.” Instead of clipping and collaging parts of The Fame Monster, her biggest reference point was Iron Butterfly’s proto-heavy metal, Top-40 track “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” “I was thinking, ‘How can I make something that’s just so bonkers that can be indicative of how crazy it can feel to try to have resilience when the world gets chaotic?’”

Gaga organically brings up the elephant in the room, the phrase that has been in her shadow ever since the debut of “Abracadabra”: “reheated nachos,” a TikTokism globbed onto pop stars recycling their own work. On a basic level, you might see it as an insult—especially in the case of Benson Boone, whose 2025 Grammys performance got him a few accusations of “reheating Harry Styles’ nachos.” But Gaga finds the phrase funny, which hopefully means Bowen Yang wrote a sketch about it just for her when she stops by Studio 8H to host tomorrow’s episode of Saturday Night Live. “I think some of it’s just because that is my musical style, that is my craftsmanship, that is me,” Gaga says, laughing. “I was just being me and not forcing myself to make a concept album. [Mayhem]’s not a concept album, it’s a pop album.”

And when Lady Gaga says that Mayhem is a “pop album,” she’s using that description loosely. It’s not a sibling of The Fame, or Born This Way, or Chromatica—even though all of those titles have mothered Mayhem into existence. Gaga, who is knocking on the doorstep of 40, has finally drawn from her greatest wellspring of inspiration, be it the chaos of counterculture punk, the panging, crushing metallic walls of Nine Inch Nails, Prince’s output with the New Power Generation or, unequivocally, David Bowie’s discography, namely Fame. She returns to the spaces of Chromatica, pulling from boogie and French house; she restores the sleazy, crooked divinity of The Fame with a potent dose of sex, power and resistance. “Vanish Into You” is her best song since “Judas”; “Zombieboy” welds a stupefying, Chic-like, four-on-the-floor rhythm with a head-splitting, angular guitar stroke; “How Bad Do U Want Me” summons the synths of Vince Clarke; power-balladry lights a fire within “Blade of Grass”; “Garden of Eden” soothes Gaga’s pleasured, bad-romantic soul after her slow-dance with sinners on “Disease”; the fist-pumping “Perfect Celebrity” calls back to her 2009 VMAs performance, where she bled from her stomach while singing “Paparazzi”—leaving a lot of people asking the same question then that I have now, as I listen to Mayhem front-to-back: How the hell did she pull this off?

This is some of the most joy Gaga has felt making music, all but confirmed not just by her tone of voice when speaking to me about Mayhem, but in “Vanish Into You”‘s emphatic, “We were happy just to be alive” chorus. And it’s going to make a lot of her longtime fans happy too. Just like how her unpredictable outfits during the awards show cycle of 2010/2011 kept everyone guessing, the songs of Mayhem are just as capricious, strange and rewarding. It helps that Gaga chose all of her collaborators and served as both co-producer and executive producer for the project, on top of her already deep, laborious immersion in the writing and recording processes. She, Watt and Cirkut completed the album at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, striping her bold-lettered choruses with controlled medleys of electronics, percussion and tempo-surfing guitars. Suffice to say, she had her hands all over the making of it, and that plays a significant role in the album being her best since the zoomers were barely even tweens. The Gesaffelstein-assisted “Killah” is a good marker of that closeness and control, as her pop bombast sits perfectly in the lap of the French electro titan’s fusions of drum’n’bass and post-punk into this splash of industrial funk. “It’s so confident,” Gaga affirms. “It’s so free and it sounds like nothing I’ve ever put out before.”

Listening to Mayhem, I began thinking about the first time I watched Lady Gaga perform, when she opened the 2011 VMAs dressed in drag, parading around the stage and behind pianos as her chainsmoking, greaseball male alter ego, Jo Calderone. She kept up the act for the entire ceremony, giving the Vanguard Award to Britney Spears while sporting slicked, Elvis-style hair and a dirty white t-shirt beneath a dime-store blazer. The morning after, a brand and image consultant called Gaga’s act “a brand destroyer” that “left people confused as to who she is.” Gaga didn’t give one fuck then, and she sure doesn’t give a fuck now. She didn’t become the most-streamed female artist in the world because of industry complacency.

If you want to call Gaga a “living legend” you’d be correct, but I think “outrageous” colors her best, even 17 years after The Fame dared an entire generation of outliers to make their own desire disgusting, to write themselves into the stars. In that vein, Mayhem is outrageous, for how it lets both the good and bad parts of Gaga’s career collide into each other so generously. Many names have dominated the avant-pop game in-between Born This Way and Mayhem, names like Chappell Roan and Charli xcx, both of whom have very obviously and affectionately tried keeping the torch lit in the name of Joanne, Jo, Lady and Mother Monster. But the artist known off-stage as Stefani Germanotta is her own architect: “This version of me is me very confidently saying, ‘I will decide what Lady Gaga means.’”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.