Lady Gaga MAYHEM review: ‘Gaga in her most straightforward pop star mode since The Fame’

Both little monsters and the pop music world have been waiting with bated breath for the release of Lady Gaga‘s seventh studio album Mayhem, and finally the day is upon us. The LP lands in our laps after a peculiar period in the singer’s career. Fresh off the back of a career low with critically-panned Joker: Folie A Deux, which looked like it could have put a bullet in the star’s once promising acting career, and its duff companion album Harlequin, new album Mayhem promised a return to the sort of balls to the wall pop extravaganza that cemented Gaga’s status as a once in a generation kind of pop star.

The album’s singles campaign had its peaks and troughs. Lead track ‘Disease’ was met with a somewhat lukewarm reception, stalling at number 27 on the Billboard Hot 100, although it managed to climb to the Top 10 here in the UK. The song’s spooky video seemed to indicate the singer was returning to the darker pop sonics and aesthetics of her imperial phase, circa 2009’s The Fame Monster and 2011’s Born This Way, relieving those who found the bombastic sheen of Gaga’s most recent studio effort Chromatica rather hollow. Others, however, likened the song to the weaker tracks from her earlier canonical albums, leading some to even go as far as to accuse the artist of, for want of a better phrase (and we really do want for one) – “reheating her own nachos”.

Following the single’s underperformance, Gaga seemingly retrofitted her anodyne but infectious and brilliant Bruno Mars collaboration ‘Die With A Smile’ as an official single from the album as the song stormed the charts, ultimately becoming the longest charting number one of her entire career. Then came GRAMMY night, where the artist walked away with a trophy for the Mars collaboration, and later debuted the album’s third and final pre-release single ‘Abracadabra’. The song’s Paris Goebbels-choreographed video and ‘Judas’-aping hook inspired a frenzy in her fervent fanbase, acting like a vape to a community gasping for a puff from the bonkers diva to whom they’d once pledged allegiance.

Now the album is here in its entirety, what has she actually delivered? Somewhat surprisingly, on Mayhem, we find the singer in her most straightforward pop star mode since her debut album. Much of the music harks back to a Gaga of yesteryear, but it’s not, largely, that of the eerie, spooky pop of ‘Bloody Mary’ or of the industrial sounding ‘Government Hooker’ – in fact, it’s more often akin to the frothy pop princess we first encountered on much of The Fame, an album that also managed to distract from broadly very conventional sounding pop songs with eye catching and unusual (for the time) visuals. On the thank you notes of that album, Gaga took pause to explicitly express gratitude to Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Prince, Madonna and Chanel, and here, she similarly wears her influences on her sleeve, evoking the sounds of 80s pop and rock on a number of these tracks.

In the press materials for Mayhem, Gaga spoke of facing her “fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” and on the album’s third track “Garden of Eden” she faces that fear head on. Listening to the singer tell us “I’ll t-t-take you to the Garden of Eden”, we momentarily expect the next line to be “yeah we got that disco, D-I-S-C-O, and we’re in heaven,” calling back to a deep cut from her debut, ‘Disco Heaven’, which oddly feels instructive for much of the music on Mayhem. On what is the first Gesaffelstein production of the album, fans expecting a brutalist, industrial sound from this pairing will be disappointed – if anything this sounds closer to the star’s earliest pre-Fame demos (‘Ribbons’ and ‘Retro Physical’ spring to mind – if you know, you know) or perhaps the sleazy-pop ditty ‘Beautiful Dirty Rich’.

On ‘Perfect Celebrity’ we hear her grapple with fame in ways that feel, again, reminiscent of her earliest work. Lyrics like “Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high, sit in the front row, watch the princess die” feel a touch recycled from previous efforts, namely the fabled ARTPOP leftover ‘Princess Die’, though the song itself is perfectly serviceable. On the verses of ‘Vanish Into You’ she evokes the sounds of the Pet Shop Boys and Bronski Beat on what is the first song that feels quite inessential.

On ‘Killah (feat. Gesaffelstein)’, Gaga returns to a seductive glam rock sound we’ve heard her experiment with before on Born This Way cuts like ‘Electric Chapel’ and ‘Bad Kid’. The spirit of Prince is very much present here with the Purple One’s fingerprints all over this funky track. The song’s punk-sounding crescendo is a rare but fleeting glimpse at the sort of harsh-sounding product we expected from French DJ and producer Gesaffelstein.

Next up: ‘Zombieboy’… and we’re firmly back in ‘Disco Heaven’ territory. The song opens with a ‘Mickey’-esque cheerleader chant, before Gaga gives us her best Debbie Harry ‘Rapture’ impression on the verses. “Put your paws all over me you zombieboy,” she sings, boldly daring us to type the dreaded words “reheated nachos”. Nevertheless, she sounds at home, and the end result is a lot of fun.

Things lag considerably on the album’s back half. A song like ‘LoveDrug’, whilst pleasant, is so unambitious in its scope, it feels a little beneath inclusion on a Gaga album in 2025. Meanwhile ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’ legitimately sounds like it could have been sung by Ally, Gaga’s A Star Is Born pop star cypher (in fact, Ally has quite a bit to answer for on many of these album tracks). By the time we get to ‘Don’t Call Tonight’ things are getting worryingly samey. The hook sounds similar to Kim Petras’s ‘Close Your Eyes’, ironically a song on which Petras is herself evoking the dark pop sounds of early Gaga. Later, on the bridge, a robotic voice calls back to the climax of ‘Heavy Metal Lover’ – although it’s a bit of an unwelcome reminder because, truthfully, nothing here sounds anywhere even near as fresh or exciting as that song still sounds today.

The energy rises for album stand out ‘Shadow of a Man’, which sounds very much a piece with lead single ‘Disease’. Here the artist summons the spirit of Michael Jackson while maintaining an exhilarating and unmistakably Gaga edge. An electric guitar riff is employed to great effect in the track’s outro, leaving us wanting more of this vibe. ‘The Beast’ is one of the seven tracks Gaga co-wrote with her venture capitalist fiancé Michael Polansky, whom she credits with having encouraged her to make pop music again. Whilst we thank Michael for his services in pushing his betrothed to grace the airwaves with her presence again, songs like this and the insipid ‘Blade of Grass’ lead us to feel he might be best not giving up the day job.

The latter track, which also marks the album’s final contribution from Gesaffelstein, whose signature sound is almost completely undetectable on his work here, has Gaga toying with Lana Del Rey circa-‘West Coast’ melancholic balladry on the verses, before submitting wholeheartedly to her absolute worst impulses for a stadium-ready power ballad chorus in the vein of the awful Top Gun soundtrack single ‘Hold My Hand’. This overwrought number does manage to segue nicely into her chart-topping, soaring Bruno Mars collaboration, which actually feels much more at home on this album than we previously imagined possible.

And that’s our lot. There’s no denying that ‘Abracadabra’ was quite the red herring, as nothing else on Mayhem comes close to its aggresive, frenetic atmosphere. We’d be lying if we said this album did not conjure up fond, warm memories of the artist’s poptimistic early cuts, but we can’t help but wonder if a collection of songs that evoke the vibe of The Fame demos is really what the doctor ordered at this point in her career? Musically, however, the album sounds richer and fuller than the synthetic-leaning Chromatica, and vocally she sounds not just at home but at leisure here across the board.

When all is said and done, does anything here sound as thrilling or innovative as the best parts of Born This Way? No. Does it sound like the product of a fully grown, studied and confident artist with very little left to prove? Certainly.