A faraway look entered Lady Gaga’s eyes near the end of a conversation I had with her in Santa Monica late last year. I’d asked the pop superstar, whose Las Vegas residency “Jazz & Piano” had recently concluded, whether she might revive the show at some point; the question led her to muse for a moment on her relationship to genre — more specifically, on her reputation as an artist always eager to try her hand at a new one.
“And to fall in love with it,” she added. “I mean, the thing I missed the most when I left New York City when I was younger was the community of people I grew up with on the Lower East Side. And in that community, your references — what you learned, what you talked about when you went out, what you emulated in your performances — that was the way you communicated.”
Three months after our chat, which took place as Gaga was putting the finishing touches on her latest studio album, I can see why the old days were on her mind: “Mayhem,” which came out Friday, is teeming with affectionate references to the likes of David Bowie, Blondie, Nine Inch Nails, New Order and Chic; it also alludes to earlier songs by Lady Gaga, not least her 2009 smash “Bad Romance,” which echoes through several of her new tracks.
“I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them,” she told Entertainment Weekly when asked about a viral stan meme that claims she’s “reheating her own nachos” in the album’s “Abracadabra.”
Indeed, this self-mythologizing suits a giant of 2010s pop whose music has shaped her inheritors as clearly as stuff by Bowie, Prince and Madonna shaped her. But recycling is a tempting gambit when inspiration starts running thin — one way to shore up a sagging fan base around an LP that exists primarily to justify a tour (which is where the real money is these days).
That approach has proved ineffective lately for some of Gaga’s Obama-era peers, including Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry. Both released albums last year explicitly framed as returns to form; both flopped. For a minute there it looked pretty shaky for Gaga, too: “Disease,” the original-recipe opener of “Mayhem,” peaked at No. 27 on Billboard’s Hot 100 — not exactly a hoped-for comeback after a few years in which she focused on acting and made a couple of jazz records. What’s more, the enormous success of “Die With a Smile,” her plush throwback duet with Bruno Mars, suggested that she’s viewed at age 38 as having reached the adult-contemporary phase of her career, never to revisit the edgier dance-pop of her youth.
“Mayhem” puts the lie to that idea: Brash, squirmy, full of detailed grooves and expertly crafted hooks, it’s a winning reclamation of her trademark sound — her best since 2011’s “Born This Way” and precisely the album you’d want her to drop before headlining Coachella, as Lady Gaga will do next month.
This isn’t her first attempt to tap into the energy that made her a star. “Chromatica,” from 2020, was positioned as a kind of corrective to the classic-rock experimentation of 2016’s “Joanne” (which itself was positioned as a corrective to the perceived excesses of 2013’s “Artpop”). Yet “Chromatica’s” disco excursions were largely lost to the pandemic, and anyway “Mayhem” is more fortunately timed, with Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan having brought color and pageantry back to the Top 40 after a long stretch of whispery gloom and Charli XCX having revived the so-called indie-sleaze aesthetic that once ruled Gaga’s beloved Lower East Side.
Also: “Mayhem” is better than “Chromatica” — more tuneful, more coherent, certainly more fun. The songs are about all the ways that love and sex and stardom overlap, but even when she’s singing about being devoured — “Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high / Sit in the front row, watch the princess die” — she sounds like she’s having a blast. Working with a team of producers including Cirkut, Andrew Watt and Gesaffelstein, she loads up the songs with juicy bass lines and squealing electric guitar as she cycles through a battery of kooky accents and vocal tics. “Killah” interpolates a lick from Bowie’s “Fame”; “Perfect Celebrity” nods to NIN’s industrial funk; “Zombieboy” evokes the fizzy Champagne high that Chic figured out how to bottle.
“I’ve been feeling this familiar feeling / Like I’ve known you my whole life,” she tells a lover in “Garden of Eden,” which borrows an instantly identifiable whoa-oh-oh from “Bad Romance.” The welcome trick she pulls off on “Mayhem” is how alive the memory feels.
