Even all through Girl Gaga’s requisite ups and downs as a singer, songwriter and actress (the much less mentioned about final 12 months’s “Joker: Folie à Deux,” the higher), the 38-year-old New Yorker born Stefani Germanotta has remained imperially well-known for therefore lengthy, it may be tough to recall the subversive thrill of her preliminary rise.
When she ascended to superstardom in 2009, Gaga was an unabashed striver of a downtown membership child who lower her crowd-pleasing electro-pop with a deadpan, Warholian have an effect on and an old school sense of musical showmanship. Whether or not dressed like an alien, an evil monarch or a butcher store’s show window, she reveled in artifice and rewrote the script for the feminine pop star, reimagining sexuality as one thing weirder and extra expansive — for each herself and her fervent fan base — than it had been within the Britney-and-Christina period. She was a welcome shock to pop’s system within the risk-averse late aughts — a romanticized period she mines for self-mythologizing nostalgia on her emphatic new album, “Mayhem.”
“Mayhem” is a vibrant, shiny and totally glossy pop report, produced by Gaga, the rock-star whisperer Andrew Watt and the Max Martin protégé Cirkut. Even at its dirtiest — the digital grunge of “Excellent Superstar,” the slithering liquid funk of “Killah” — each sound is etched in clear, daring traces.
It’s significantly sharper than her earlier two pop solo efforts, the tepid 2016 quasi-country album, “Joanne,” and her sadly timed 2020 return to the dance ground, “Chromatica,” a blended bag that now sounds overly dated due to its embrace of pop’s then-trendy obsession with sound-alike home samples and beats. (Gaga just lately admitted in a New York Occasions Journal interview that she wasn’t working at her highest degree within the “Chromatica” period: “I used to be in a extremely darkish place,” she mentioned, “and I wouldn’t say I made my greatest music throughout that point.”)
However over the previous few months, Gaga has stoked anticipation for her sixth pop LP with a wildly profitable (if comparatively anodyne), chart-topping Bruno Mars duet, “Die With a Smile,” and two of her hardest-hitting singles in a decade: the deliciously warped “Illness,” a churning, industrial pop dirge that highlights 9 Inch Nails as an affect on this album, and “Abracadabra,” a latex-tight dance-floor incantation with a refrain that finds her talking in tongues just like the excessive priestess of her personal self-referential faith: “Abracadabra, amor ooh na na / Abracadabra morta ooh Gaga.” It’s, after all, an expertly executed sequel to her 2009 smash “Unhealthy Romance,” simply as the next observe, the skronky, gloriously hedonistic “Backyard of Eden” performs out like an much more vivid return to the membership she visited on her first hit, “Simply Dance.”
All through its 14 tracks, “Mayhem” dances on the road between intelligent self-referentiality and fewer impressed rehashing. The corrosive “Excellent Superstar” is a sonic spotlight that nonetheless butts up towards the album’s thematic and lyrical limitations, returning to one among her favourite, and now drained, subjects: the injury inflicted by fame. Is the opening line — “I’m product of plastic like a human doll” — a winking throwback to the “Chromatica” observe “Plastic Doll,” or a little bit of recycled imagery?
For the primary time since her semi-misunderstood 2013 bacchanal “Artpop,” Girl Gaga commits to the clenched-fist conviction and over-the-top extra that made her a star within the first place. She sounds locked in all all through “Mayhem,” even throughout its most middling and questionable materials, which begins across the eighth observe and carries by way of the second half. The midtempo “LoveDrug” will get misplaced in lyrical clichés, whereas the slow-crawling electro ballad “The Beast” feels written expressly for placement within the trailer of an immediately forgettable direct-to-streaming erotic thriller (although Gaga sings the heck out of it simply the identical).
Nonetheless, her riskier strikes normally repay. “Killah,” an outré collaboration with the French D.J. and producer Gesaffelstein, stretches a sex-is-death metaphor to really absurd extremes, however Gaga, vamping like an much more cartoonish model of David Bowie circa “Younger People,” provides the track a goofy urgency that’s exhausting to withstand.
Whereas there’s loads of superficial gore and carnage on “Mayhem” — and far of it’s enjoyably campy, just like the lite-disco “Hollaback Lady” throwback “Zombieboy” — the album’s underlying conflicts are inner. Within the elaborately choreographed video for “Abracadabra,” two opposing Gagas wrestle for management; on the wrenching “How Unhealthy Do U Need Me,” the opposite lady is a shadow self.
That track, a deliriously catchy synth-pop anthem that attracts such clear inspiration from Taylor Swift that some followers thought she was an uncredited backing singer on the observe (she isn’t), is essentially the most clearly by-product second on “Mayhem” — and in addition among the best and most fascinating.
Centered round a percolating interpolation of Yaz’s 1982 new-wave traditional “Solely You,” Gaga’s hovering, impassioned vocal provides the digitized association a jolt of humanity. “How Unhealthy Do U Need Me” stands out for sounding comparatively au courant, contemplating that the remainder of the album attracts on the sounds of pop’s latest previous or timeless legends (Bowie, Prince and Michael Jackson are all touchstones). But it surely additionally shows a way of old-school vocal prowess that elevates Gaga above her latest friends.
Within the time since Gaga’s most dominant affect, and below Swift’s highly effective star, pop music has change into significantly chattier, looser and extra performatively confessional. Even artists who current themselves in opposition to Swift’s aesthetics have been remodeled by them: see Charli XCX’s 2024 sensation “Brat” (like “Mayhem,” fueled by nostalgia for the 2000s), which is crammed with shrugging, run-on lyrics that really feel trustworthy and uncooked in a method that continues to elude Girl Gaga. In the case of expressing her demons or needs, Gaga would nonetheless quite attain for an overwritten monster metaphor. Subtlety, she reminds us all through the maximalist spectacle of “Mayhem,” has by no means been her love language, and she will solely convincingly play the woman subsequent door when you occur to dwell on the darkish facet of Mars.
However that can also be what makes “Mayhem” really feel like a refreshing anomaly. Lately, pop vocalists have additionally change into quieter, breathier and extra restrained — which in some circumstances is a well mannered method of claiming much less gifted. In a world of so-called lowercase pop, Gaga nonetheless has the caps-lock on in a daring, 96-point font, like she did in 2009. All through the album, she belts to the heavens and hits her marks with precision and aptitude, reminding her friends what a capital-E entertainer feels like. If that makes her old school, so be it — generally there’s a profit to sounding a bit behind the occasions.
