Mayhem Managed
The latest Lady Gaga album isn't just a return to form. It's a throwback to a bygone era of big-tent pop blockbusters.
Lady Gaga - Mayhem
For years, one of my most closely held opinions about music has been that The White Stripes represent the last of the classic rock bands— the end of a long lineage of guitar-based groups who achieve creative, commercial, and critical success while embodying the kinds of institutional values that might one day land them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But what if I’ve been wrong this whole time— what if there’s someone still carrying those classicist values into contemporary popular music?
Consider Lady Gaga.
More than anyone else who regularly charts in 2025, Gaga has long exhibited reverence for canonical rock and roll: Her gangbusters 2011 album Born This Way concluded with showstopping sax work from Clarence Clemons, famed denizen of E-Street, and in 2023 Gaga had a prestigious supporting role on Hackney Diamonds, the long-awaited studio return of The Rolling Stones. It’s easy to list all the ways in which she has proven her institutionalist bona fides, even without mentioning the charming standards albums she cut with the late Tony Bennett.
Now comes Mayhem, the most rapturously received album Gaga has cut since Born This Way— not exactly a comeback, since she’s remained consistently in the public eye, but the first thing she’s done in a long time that doesn’t feel discursive to the central project of being Lady Gaga. In other words, it’s the sound of Lady Gaga doing what she did first and does best— making pop anthems that are a little weird but imminently club-ready, loaded with personality, and consistently full of freakish fun.
The album also feels like a throwback to an earlier era of pop blockbuster— you could call it classic rock, if your definition of classic rock is broad enough to include flagship releases from Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. The 14 songs on Mayhem fly by in 53 minutes— it could have easily fit onto a single disc, without any signs of streaming-era bloat— and every one of them sounds like it’s designed to be a radio single: Short, tuneful, high-energy even when the tempo slows.
This is the opposite of Taylor Swift releasing hours-long anthologies of outtakes and vault tracks: This is Lady Gaga making tough editorial decisions about which songs to include and which to cut, ensuring Mayhem can sound exciting over close to an hour of sustained, attentive listening. In other words, it feels carefully assembled in the way big pop albums generally did, before streaming made indulgence and indecision the norms.
Even the album’s sequencing feels like a callback to the golden age of monoculture pop. The bangers come first, an exhilarating run of pop anthems with huge choruses and throbbing dancefloor beats. The albums back half relaxes into a few gentler numbers, including some ballads and grown-up pop that signal Mayhem’s crossover appeal— Lady Gaga is the kind of pop star who wants to invite everyone into the tent without compromising her identity or values, and Mayhem is astonishingly effective at casting broad appeal while maintaining a distinct personality.
Throughout the album, there are aesthetic and formal choices that make Mayhem feel like it could have been the album Michael released just after Thriller, or David Bowie on the heels of Let’s Dance. Remember electric guitars? There are metallic riffs adorning the glorious disco romp “Zombieboy,” the kind of dance-rock synergy that Eddie Van Halen might have once been enlisted to provide. Speaking of Thriller, “Perfect Celebrity” stylishly conjures the kind of famous-person paranoia that made “Billie Jean” so pungent. On the album-closing “Die with a Smile,” Gaga welcomes high-wattage showman Bruno Mars for what feels like an old-school superstar duet.
Perhaps it dulls some of the album’s luster to call it a classic rock throwback or a return to form— making it sound calculated rather than inspired. That’s not totally off the mark. Gaga deliberately plays to her strengths here, and Mayhem conveys big “give the people what they want” energy. But rather than sounding pro forma, this consolidation of strengths inspires Gaga to lean into the idiosyncrasies of her persona— the careful assembly of these songs provides clear, stark lines for her to color outside of.
Nowhere is that more apparent then on the delightful lead single, “Abracadabra,” where Gaga sings the herky-jerk hook as though she’s toppling down the stairs. On a recent NPR segment, venerable critic Ann Powers suggested that Mayhem has a “Kate Bush on the moors” vibe, and that’s certainly apparent as the earworm pop of “Abracadabra” turns into a pagan moon dance, complete with Gaga chanting glorious nonsense lyrics: “Abracadabra/ Amor oo na na/ Abracadabra/ Morta oo gaga!” Here is one of the secrets to her appeal: Lady Gaga takes this kind of silliness very seriously.
That’s not even the most fun song on the album: “Zombieboy” is pure disco euphoria, with a half-rapped vocal reminiscent of Blondie’s “Rapture”— its old-school freestyle vibe the album’s only gesture toward hip-hop. Here and throughout the album, Gaga uses her jazz phrasing and operatic range to maximum effect, playfully contorting her vocals for maximum, campy appeal— wonderfully schlocky moments on “Zombieboy” call to mind David Bowie in Labyrinth, or perhaps late-night B-movie narration from Elvira.
Bowie is an obvious touchpoint for this record, not least on “Killah”— another album highlight, pitched somewhere between the loose-limbed guitar funk of the Young Americans era and Prince at the peak of his DIY sleaze. Elsewhere, Gaga summons the claustrophobic spirit of Radiohead, the industrial effects of Nine Inch Nails, even some of the gothic grandeur of bands like Evanescence. Listen to the jagged riffs on “Perfect Celebrity,” a seething, jet-black rocker.
Much of Mayhem is inspired by Gaga’s engagement to Michael Polansky, though anyone expecting uncomplicated romance a la Cheek to Cheek, one of the albums she made with Tony Bennett, will surely be thrown by the album’s weird streak. For one thing, there is something of an enchanted bestiary here— not just in “Zombieboy” but also “The Beast,” a brooding number about the pitfalls of loving a werewolf. Angels and devils make prominent appearances, too.
More broadly, the songs here view love and marriage as forms of obliteration— death to the self. “Die with a Smile” is a song about finding that perfect someone, just in time to weather the apocalypse together. One of the best songs here is “Vanish into You,” which longs for self-erasure. Even sexual intimacy is presented in morbid terms— the promise of “Killah” is that her man will die of ecstasy. “Death or love tonight,” goes the ultimatum in “Abracadabra,” but most of these songs presume that the two things are not mutually exclusive.
What animates these songs, beyond Gaga’s sheer verve, is a palpable sense of longing. “Disease,” the surging opener, longs for a cure; “Garden of Eden,” for paradise; “LoveDrug’ for a high that won’t end.
Such longing is universal, even if Gaga does articulate it in her own twisted way— and that’s crucial to making Mayhem feel like an indispensable release. In 1984, Bruce Springsteen used the big-tent pop of Born in the USA to smuggle working-class politics into the mainstream pop zeitgeist. In 2025, with institutions crumbling all around us and the last vestiges of 20th century monoculture disappearing, it’s hard just finding a center of gravity. With Mayhem, Lady Gaga invites us to believe that a big-budget pop album can still extend a wide sense of welcome, providing all of us with a shared space to voice our longings—and to unleash our weirdness— together. God bless her.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10.
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