Album Review: Mayhem by Lady Gaga

Whether you come to her for the club anthems, the messaging, the daring visuals, or the cinematic performances, Lady Gaga’s latest LP is a masterclass in how to stay true to your creative DNA.

Courtesy of Interscope Records.

From the moment Lady Gaga stepped into the mainstream with “Just Dance,” she set herself apart not just with her sound, but with her entire artistic packaging. Using fashion as a form of expression—often with outlandish, headline-grabbing pieces—she turned every public appearance into a performance piece. Remember the infamous meat dress? It was shocking, yes, but also served as a commentary on fame, consumerism, and identity. Her sense of “shock art” is part statement and part marketing genius. She would’ve fit right in with the Warhol crowd, turning the pop landscape into her own brand of high-low art. Whether she’s rocking futuristic headpieces or stepping onto the red carpet in a massive egg-like vessel, Gaga made fashion part of the story, rather than just an accessory.

Her ability to hop genres—dance-pop anthems, stripped-down piano ballads, Tony Bennett-style jazz collaborations—highlights an artist who isn’t content to just do one thing well. By blending in conceptual performances and persona changes, Lady Gaga challenges the very idea of what a “pop star” can be. Rather than shy away from controversy or oddity, she uses it as a launching pad for cultural conversation, whether about body image, sexuality, or mental health. Her fearlessness with shocking imagery or provocative stunts forces us to see the intersections between pop music, performance art, and even social activism.

Arriving after the reflective Joanne and the healing Chromatica, Mayhem has been touted as a return to Gaga’s pop roots with the benefit of everything she’s learned along the way. In many ways, the album is a statement of where Lady Gaga stands today: an artist unafraid to create “utter chaos” in her music​, while firmly grounded in love, authenticity, and the communities she cares about. From the outset, Gaga made clear that Mayhem would be a genre-bending adventure. She described the album as “utter chaos” that breaks a lot of rules and has a lot of fun, explaining that it’s about “following your own chaos into whatever cranny of your life it takes you to.”

Indeed, the influences she listed for Mayhem read like a cross-section of her musical persona: ‘90s alternative (a nod to her rock side and perhaps the grunge-y angst she’s channeled before), electro-grunge (suggesting a marriage of electronic beats with dirty guitar riffs), Prince and Bowie melodies (paying homage to the boundary-pushing pop and glam-rock greats), guitar and attitude (likely reflecting her comfort with rock/pop fusion after Joanne), funky bass lines, French electronic dance, and analog synths​. With the help of Andrew Watt and Cirkut, this cornucopia of styles indicates that Mayhem is Gaga at her most musically free—blending the dance-floor pulse of her early years with the instrumental and genre diversity she’s explored in the past decade.

The album can back this up: the lead single “Disease” rides a bass-heavy dance groove but swerves into a grungy chorus, “How Bad Do U Want Me” presents jealousy and self-worth over bouncy synth-driven beat, as well as the tension between fantasy and reality, and “Killah” is a collaboration with French DJ Gesaffelstein that layers eerie synthwave over hip-hop beat. For Gaga’s fans, when listening to this record—it’s the kind of fearless experimentation they expect from her, yet it also deliberately calls back to every era of her career (even the promotional countdown on her website teased each of her previous albums in succession, signaling that Mayhem is the culmination of all those sounds).

Driven by its dynamic use of electronic elements, “Shadow of a Man” blends synths with a driving beat that stresses the song’s emotional weight. Gaga’s vocal delivery is powerful and stirring, conveying vulnerability and strength as she navigates through self-discovery (“Standing in the shadow of another man, lonely as the streets I'm walking on”). The opening lines on “Perfect Celebrity” where Gaga sings, “I’m made of plastic like a human doll/You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all,” immediately set up an image of a pliant, artificial persona that is manipulated by external forces employing disjointed yet deliberate structure that reflects the fragmentation of identity in a media-saturated society. Throughout “LoveDrug,” “Zombieboy,” “Don’t Call Tonight,” and the slow buildup of “The Beast,” the language oscillates between the stark, visual metaphors of shadows and light and more emotive expressions of yearning and defiance.

“The Beast” presents a tightly integrated narrative where moments of intimacy and aggression collide, ultimately portraying revealing one’s inner wild force as both a necessary reckoning and a liberating act of self-acceptance. “Blade of Grass” closes the record, a piano ballad on how the dissolution of traditional structures can pave the way for self-empowerment, suggesting that personal identity and intimacy are forged through the courage to redefine the self outside acquiescing frameworks. This deliberate collision of fragility—captured in references to a “garden made of thorns” and the “lawn of memories”—with an almost fatal embrace (“Hold me until I die and I'll make you brand new”) encourages an interpretation of love as simultaneously a source of vulnerability and a mechanism for radical renewal.

Mayhem also reflects Gaga’s current position, balancing her experimental tendencies with pop accessibility, even if a select few tracks don’t stand out in a way. On the positive side, the second single, “Abracadabra,” is the peak of Gaga. At this stage in her career, Gaga has nothing left to prove in terms of hits, she’s had plenty, which frees her to get weird. Yet, interestingly, Mayhem has already yielded a massive mainstream hit in “Die With a Smile,” a soulful, retro-inspired pop-funk track (thanks to D’Mile) that topped the charts and even broke Spotify streaming records​. This duality captures Gaga’s unique spot in pop culture: she can unleash a cacophony of styles on one album, push the envelope of sound, and still create songs that resonate broadly.

In cultural terms, Mayhem positions Lady Gaga firmly as an elder stateswoman of pop who still has the will to experiment like a newcomer. She’s now in her late 30s, a time when many pop stars play it safe, but Mayhem is arguably one of her most daring efforts—not in the naive way of chasing shock value, but in an artistically free way, unconstrained by trend or formula. The album’s themes of making peace with chaos and finding love and peace at the end of it all also resonate with a world recovering from a chaotic few years (pandemic, social upheaval). Gaga, who spent 2020 organizing a global COVID relief concert and 2021 filming a movie (House of Gucci), clearly poured the turmoil of recent times and her personal growth into Mayhem. It’s an album very much of its time and of her mind.

Lady Gaga’s legacy is one of fearless evolution. She carved her lane by mixing music, theatrical flair, high-concept fashion, and raw emotional honesty. Her journey from NYU’s Tisch performer to global phenomenon shows how training, talent, and relentless vision can redefine an industry. By blending pop hooks with art-house sensibilities—and later proving her dramatic chops—she’s set a high bar for artists who want to transcend a single medium. Whether you come to her for the club anthems, the activist messaging, the daring visuals, or the cinematic performances, Mayhem is a masterclass in staying true to your creative DNA while continually surprising the world.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Garden of Eden,” “Killah,” “Blade of Grass”