"I'm a pretty soft person," Lady Gaga muses. "But my music's not." Indeed, for an artist who has come to represent all that is maximalist, fantastical, prurient, and potent about celebrity, Lady Gaga seems, smiling in a black beanie and twin blonde braids, almost disarmingly warm. "I don't really know where it comes from," the artist born Stefani Germanotta tells Stereogum of her imminent seventh album, Mayhem. "I often ask myself, 'Why?'" Why — when she has found success beyond most musicians' wildest dreams; established herself not just as a pop princess, but as a jazz crooner who can keep up with the likes of Tony Bennett; when she has found the love of her life, the tech entrepreneur (and Mayhem co-producer) Michael Polansky — did she want to write an album seeped in chaos, madness, heartbreak, and, well, mayhem? "I thrive in intensity," she answers. "That's a big part of what this album is all about — vulnerability and aggression at the same time. That's where I live."
In its early days, Mayhem lived, more specifically, in Malibu. There, Lady Gaga and a small group of intimate collaborators — Polansky, along with Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt and Canadian dance pop whisperer Cirkut — wrote and recorded the album at Rick Rubin's storied Shangri-La studio. A push from Polansky set her sights on pop after 2024's Harlequin, an album of jazz standards to accompany her starring role as the janus-haired mad scientist Harley Quinn in last year's Joker: Folie à Deux. For this project, she immersed herself in other larger-than-life characters, the ones that made her fall in love with music as an aspiring performer pounding the pavement on the Lower East Side: "David Bowie, Prince, Earth Wind And Fire," but also "Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, grunge."
There are phantasmic references to her encyclopedic knowledge of pop all over Mayhem. On the earth-shattering club epic "Abracadabra," with staccato vocals sharpened like a razor's edge and a shuddering four-on-the-floor beat, she conjures Factory Records and the "Madchester" raves that brought punks and partiers under the same sweaty roof in the service of hard-fought hedonism. "Zombie Boy," with its swaggering bassline and shimmering synths, sounds like a post-apocalyptic roller disco as Gaga begs for the affection of a man who's long gone: "Put your paws all over me, you zombie boy!" "Shadow Of A Man" recalls the locomotive house of French Touch, a sound she most recently explored on 2020's otherworldly Chromatica.
But even as ghosts of Gaga echo throughout the record, Mayhem finds the musician pushing into new territories, in full command of both her voice and the melodious madhouse that surrounds it. I kept coming back to the codas on the album — the way more than one song ends not with some grand sung declaration, but with an extended glimpse at the synths, drums, guitars and pianos at her back. Talking to Gaga, it's immediately obvious that she had a direct hand in every minor detail involved in the album's production. She prefers the classic sound of an analog synth: "They have a nostalgic sound; you can't quite get the same feeling any other way." The writing process for the effervescent and lovesick "Vanish Into You" began with just her voice and a modular Moog, and she and her producers took inspiration from the ways the machines could warp and manipulate familiar sounds: "We ran bass lines through the synths, and Andrew [Watt] brought in a mechanic to manually adjust the low end." Mayhem, then, is the sound of Lady Gaga in full control: "I felt confident that I could go into the studio and work on the album of my dreams."
Perhaps now is a good time to bring up the "gothic" fantasies Lady Gaga has been having lately — "I have these dark dreams…" she starts to say, pausing to think about what they signified. "Maybe it's how I experience a night out. Living on the edge is definitely something I did for a long time, and my memory of that time is really strong and powerful. It still haunts me." Mayhem is her way of bringing us on that journey back in time, "like I'm taking you through one night with me," she explains. "It's chaotic, all the things we go through in that one evening," which, by her estimate, wraps up around nine in the morning. There's a sense that morning's never promised: In the music video for "Disease," she plays a car crash victim fighting for her life on the roof of a grey sedan, dancing on death's door as she sings about curing her lover's "poison on the inside." On "Killa," a gossamer slow burn featuring production from the French electro legend Gesaffelstein, she layers the thick onslaught of a kick drum over lyrics about how she's "gonna make you scream." The rapturous "The Beast" finds her making a Faustian deal with the devil, evoking her onscreen romance with a certain clown térrible as she sings, "Last week you left somebody dead/ You're so misunderstood!"
There's a reason the "soft" side of Gaga rarely gets much airtime on her records. "I'll go into the studio and make something that sounds so aggressive," she explains. "It's how I get my energy, my anger, my frustration with the world out. I have a lot of deep feelings about being a woman in music." That fury is palpable on the whip smart "Perfect Celebrity" as she sings, "You make me money, I'll make you laugh," and, more pointedly, "I look so hungry but I look so good," imagining herself in the front seat of a paparazzi swarm sitting next to Princess Diana. "I had been waiting to write that for maybe 15 years," she said, and her ire had only grown more relevant in the years since the social networks that dominated her early days, like PureVolume and Myspace, were replaced by YouTube and TikTok — the age of the everyday "perfect celebrity." "We're all living these double lives," she added. "The real us, and the public facing us."
And yet, there's a kind of optimism that seeps into Mayhem, a sense of being totally taken by a muse, perhaps inspired by having her partner as such a close collaborator on the album. "Michael really meant a lot to me making this album," she said. "He was in the studio every single day. It's a powerful thing to go through the process of making an artistic baby with someone that you love, because also nobody will call you out more than your partner." For every time she turns back towards the "poison" — "Don't call tonight unless you want to hurt me," she sings over the captivatingly minimal "Don't Call Tonight" — there's one like the effusive euphoria of "Love Drug" set to guitar riff that evokes the effervescence of New Order and the immediacy of the Strokes, or the coy romance anthem "How Bad Do You Want Me," which channels new wave pioneers like Yazoo and the Eurythmics in its glittering and giddy synths.
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As she took home a Grammy Award for Mayhem’s triumphant closer, her soaring Bruno Mars duet "Die With A Smile," Gaga channeled her righteous rage in her acceptance speech: "Trans people are not invisible," she said, defiantly using her platform to speak out as the Trump administration carries out unspeakably cruel acts of violence upon the trans community on a daily basis. "Trans people deserve love; the queer community deserves to be lifted up." What did she think of Chappell Roan's Grammy battlecry for better artist support from labels, including health care and a sense of mental safety for new artists? "I think labels definitely can learn from people like Chappell," she replies. "I think it's wonderful that she spoke out. It makes me happy to see young artists standing up for themselves and what they believe in."
There's that ever-present duality again — the divide between the private and public lives of Gaga; between calling out to the past (catch the "bad romance" she mentions on "Garden Of Eden") and pushing pop music forward with each new release; between the warm person she is and the fierce, unblinking master of her domain she becomes as soon as she steps up to the mic. But maybe the extremes are where the inspiration begins. On her seventh album, Gaga is the antidote and the poison, the saint and the sinner, the lion tamer and the beast herself. "Mayhem," she tells me, "is about how you need Heaven to feel Hell."
Mayhem is out 3/7 via Interscope.
