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Lady Gaga’s single Abracadabra is enjoying its fifth consecutive week in the UK Top 10. You can imagine a collective sigh of relief chez Gaga: she has been experiencing what you might call a case of career sea sickness, in which unadulterated commercial triumphs have been followed by very public flops. In the credit column, there’s Die With a Smile, a power-ballad duet with Bruno Mars that went to No 1 in 28 countries and spent 10 weeks as the world’s biggest-selling single. (Released last August, it also appears on Mayhem.) In the debit, there was her starring role in the disastrous Joker: Folie à Deux, a film that was estimated to have lost Warner Brothers something in the region of $150m (£116m), and which seemed to take both the Gaga-heavy soundtrack and her own, jazz-based “companion album” Harlequin down with it. You might have expected the legions of Little Monsters (as her fans are known) to rally around the latter, but apparently not. Outside of a couple of remix collections, it was the lowest-selling Lady Gaga album to date and her second jazz album to noticeably underperform: a follow-up collection of duets with the late Tony Bennett, 2021’s Love for Sale, failed to replicate the success of its predecessor, Cheek to Cheek.
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One theory is that Gaga’s eclecticism might have succeeded in confusing people. The fact that you never quite know what she’s going to throw out next – electronic dance-pop, soft rock, jazz, country, AOR – should be cause for celebration, but perhaps it has proved a bit much in a world dominated by streaming’s overload, where artists are advised to maintain a clear brand lest they get lost amid the sheer torrent of new music. Maybe what was needed was a bold restatement of Gaga’s original core values. That was precisely what Abracadabra, and indeed its predecessor, Disease, provided: big dirty synths; big noisy choruses; high-camp, fashion-forward videos and, in the case of Abracadabra, a hook apparently designed to remind listeners of the word-mangling intro to 2009’s Bad Romance.
All this turns out to be a fair advertisement for the rest of Mayhem, which does a lot of things that anyone who fell hard for Gaga’s debut album, The Fame, might reasonably want her to do. Fizzy electronics battle for space with piano and guitar hooks. Virtually everything seems to have been constructed with one eye on the dancefloor: there are nods to Daft Punk, disco and 80s boogie and house. There are songs gleefully hymning the pleasures of the fleeting clubland hook-up as balm for the soul (Garden of Eden). And there are songs ruminating equivocally on the nature of fame: “Sit in the front row, watch the princess die,” she sings on Perfect Celebrity, both a decent pun and analogous to her “performance art piece enacting the death of celebrity” at the 2009 MTV awards, during which she sang Paparazzi while appearing to bleed out from a gash on her stomach.
It’s consistently well-written, teeming with hooks and liberally sprinkled with intriguing musical left-turns. The Prince-esque electro-funk of Killah suddenly erupts into a double-time beat that’s equal parts clipped new-wave rock and techstep drum’n’bass; the Chic-style disco of Zombieboy is unexpectedly disrupted by a widdly-woo hair metal guitar solo. Equally, it is smart enough to marshal its star’s diversity. LoveDrug indulges Gaga’s love of AOR, but a four-to-the-floor rhythm means it doesn’t jar with its surroundings. Her penchant for old-fashioned power ballads is manifested in Blade of Grass, but the song is smartly tacked on to the end of an otherwise dance-focused album, alongside the similarly minded Die With a Smile. The only obvious misstep is How Bad Do U Want Me?, which starts out great – a homage to early 80s synth-pop, specifically Yazoo – but devolves into a song over which the melodic influence of Taylor Swift hangs a little too obviously.
In truth, How Bad Do U Want Me? isn’t a bad song, but there’s something a little craven about it. Moreover, Lady Gaga doesn’t really need to chase current pop trends: Mayhem may be a reversion to core values – to the Lady Gaga of 2008 – but the striking thing is that it doesn’t feel particularly retro. Instead, it seems curiously of the moment: both Chappell Roan’s drag-queen aesthetic and outsider appeal and Charli xcx’s avant-trash place them in Gaga’s lineage.
Mayhem can’t replicate the jolt that accompanied Lady Gaga’s arrival, blood-spattered live performances and all, but it doesn’t need to. It’s a reversion to first principles that reminds you how prescient its author was in the first place: she sounds like someone returning to claim a place in a pop world that has come round to her way of thinking.
