Lady Gaga Returns to the Pop Arena With the Familiar Yet Fun Mayhem

One thing we can predict about Lady Gaga is her unpredictability. With each era, starting from her star-making 2008 debut The Fame to her 2020 utopian fantasia Chromatica, the pop icon’s defiance of expectations has always kept her Little Monsters on their toes. Her range knows no bounds, whether it’s experimenting with form (2013’s ARTPOP), flirting with other genres (2015’s Joanne, the soundtrack to 2018’s A Star is Born), or pivoting fully to jazz with Tony Bennett (2014’s Cheek to Cheek and 2021’s Love for Sale). To match these changes in her musical repertoire, her celebrity image has experienced some chameleonic detours over time too: the uber-cool glam diva, the uber-earnest theater kid, the classy and dressed-down songstress, the endearingly delusional actress and activist.

Despite these shifts and contradictions in her evolution as an artist and personality, Lady Gaga’s flair for theatrics remains the most consistent and compelling part of her appeal. Naturally, Mayhem, her seventh studio LP and first proper pop follow-up to Chromatica, is yet another expectation-defying gag, going against its initial marketing campaign as a return to Gaga’s weird, avant-garde roots and instead positioning itself as a very bright, very ‘80s-forward album.

Disorienting as it is for Gaga to flout her tease of bold, industrial-dance unhingery, Mayhem is still a fun, spry record, playing like a greatest hits of her discography that, at its best, finds Gaga at her loosest and friskiest and, at its most flawed, recycles sounds and textures from her previous work and that of other dance-pop musicians. To put it in chronically gay online terms, Gaga is reheating her own nachos here in addition to those of her peers and forebears, but they still manage to taste pretty good, all things considered.

Mayhem’s strong first half thankfully makes most of its derivative tendencies go down easy, especially with the help of Andrew Watt, Cirkut and Gessaffelstein’s decadent co-production. When it was released as the album’s lead single, the full-throated, snarling “Disease” presented an exciting, promising window into Gaga’s curated vision of chaos—melodramatic lyrics, verbal come-ons and multilayered instrumentation, all cranked up to a grungy 11. Though it now functions as an aggro outlier to the rest of Mayhem’s buoyancy, “Disease”’s deliciously demonic energy is just over-the-top enough to keep the album moving at a steady clip.

The same can be said about “Abracadabra,” a slight retread on “Bad Romance” and “Judas” whose thumping synths and gleefully gibberish chorus cast a trance-like spell over anyone who’s listening. But it’s when “Garden of Eden,” the track that follows “Abracadabra,” comes on that the album truly comes alive. As perhaps Gaga’s greatest, freshest contribution to Mayhem and one of her best songs in ages, “Garden of Eden” is an intoxicating shot of adrenaline, its cheeky biblical metaphors about temptation and carnal sin animated by a dazzling, kunty-as-hell electroclash beat. “I could be your girlfriend for the weekend / You could be my boyfriend for the night,” she sings with a conviction that somehow manages to transmogrify heterosexuality into a seductive fantasy. “Vanish Into You” is similarly powerful and effective with its operatic pining and impressively bellowing vocals, as is “Zombieboy,” a Halloween dancefloor bop that gets even better with an incredible, disarmingly sweet beat switch-up during its bridge.

Though it’s nice to see and hear Gaga be “so back,” as they say, one can’t help but pick up on how familiar the whole thing sounds, making Mayhem a kind of Gaga Mad Libs, a blueprint of the blueprints. Do you miss the glitzy irreverence of The Fame? Here’s “Garden of Eden” and “Zombieboy.” How about The Fame Monster, specifically “Alejandro”? Check out “Don’t Call Tonight.” Some Born This Way perhaps? “Vanish into You” has got you. If you think the self-referentiality verges on overkill, the outside allusions are even more immediately obvious: The thrum of “Killah”’s squealing electric guitar is a clear homage to Prince and Bowie; “Shadow of a Man” is pure Michael Jackson, so much so that you half-expect to hear a “Shamona!” or “Hee-hee!” in the background; “LoveDrug” feels like an leftover from the Weeknd’s After Hours or Miley Cyrus’s Plastic Hearts; and the yearning synth-pop of “How Bad Do U Want Me” has touches of 1989/Reputation-era Taylor Swift mixed with the hook from Yazoo’s “Only You.”

Most of these indulgences can be excused for the fact that they hit more than miss, especially if you look at Mayhem like a nesting doll-shaped tribute to what Lady Gaga loves most about her idols and what her fans love most about her. It’s only when Gaga goes ballad mode, which happens during the final three tracks, that Mayhem’s throwback gloss starts to rust. “Blades of Grass,” for instance, is a romantic ode to Gaga’s fiancée Michael Polansky, who encouraged Gaga to lean back into pop with this album, but its reliance on an overused rising/falling melody deadens the poignance it’s striving to capture. And Gaga’s Bruno Mars Grammy-winning collab “Die with a Smile,” while sometimes swooning and perfectly fine on its own, is an odd note to end the album on, a maudlin culmination to the strutting, sexy slew of upbeat bangers that came before it. Gaga’s most memorable ballads build up to a stunning emotional crescendo or swells in such a way that it leaves you vibrating (see: “Shallow,” “Always Remember Us This Way,” or my personal fave, “Speechless”), but here, these slower moments sputter Mayhem to the finish line.

Though Mayhem is far from a disappointment, it’s hard not to feel a tad bummed that not even one of the most inimitable artists of the 21st century is safe from the cannibalization of the 2020s pop landscape, where every song feels like a reference of a reference of a reference. The album artwork for Mayhem even speaks to this fixation with the past: a cracked, monochromatic mirror obscuring Gaga’s face visually echoes the sleek shades on the cover for The Fame and the latex dress on The Fame Monster that hid her visage. In that sense, the dissonance between Mayhem’s gloomy imagery and much lighter tone perfectly illustrates the reality of our current moment, whether intentional or not. Everything on the surface is bleak, fractured and drained of life, but there’s still some joy and fun left underneath, even though much of it is fueled by a nostalgia for seemingly better times. And given that she’s already gifted us with so many classics, perhaps it’s unrealistic to want Lady Gaga to reinvent the wheel at this point. Now, she gets to spin her own, for better or worse.

Read: “Decidedly Lady Gaga”

Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress and Metacritic. You can find them on Twitter @samiamrosenberg.