New album "Mayhem"

Lady Gaga: A pop comeback with self-quotes

After years between crooner and jazz songs, Lady Gaga returns to her core competence on "Mayhem": mainstream pop with an electro and 80s touch.

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Universal Music (2))

For years, Lady Gaga struggled with her mainstream pop past. Thanks in part to her fiancé and important people close to her, "Mayhem" sounds like her old self again. Despite all the hits, choreography and strong songs, there is a lack of innovation and progress.

Due to the many flickering stars on TikTok and Instagram, it has become rare for real pop talents to come up with a new studio album. And then they also release singles well in advance and give us a glimpse of their work in bits and pieces. Pop queen Lady Gaga does things differently to her colleagues, who are primarily known from the hip-hop sector, who drop their work overnight and create aha moments in the process. Gaga's mere return to her pop roots is a veritable surprise. With the recently deceased crooner Tony Bennett, she has settled into the quieter niche for two albums, and after the successful album "Chromatica" (2020), she has increasingly focused on her film career.

Facing fear
With "House Of Gucci" (2021) and "Joker: Folie à Deux" (2024), she succeeded as an actress to be taken seriously, even if the productions behind them were not big box office hits and were sometimes torn apart by critics. Parallel to the "Joker" film, she worked on jazz and lounge-like songs, which were released as her own product in the fall. However, fans of the pop queen increasingly wondered whether this was the end of her big pop career. Especially as the (predominantly female) competition never sleeps and, alongside Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus, the next generation of female singers - Charlie XCX, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and co. - have long since emerged to conquer the charts. The Hollywood Reporter, for example, published a statement saying that Gaga first had to face the fear of returning to the sound that her fans used to love.

But the harbingers were already more than promising. The return to her roots began last October with the single "Disease", a dark synth-pop song with EDM influences, which immediately became a veritable hit with its dark horror visuals in the video and the flawless production by Andrew Watt and Cirkut, leaving fans hungry for more. In it, Gaga confronts her own fears and the darkness in her thoughts, which immediately made "Disease" the key song for the upcoming album. With the second single "Abracadabra", Gaga finally went back to the roots of her juvenile pop past just over a month ago. The premiere of the music video was acclaimed at the Grammys and the song went into the top 10 worldwide. The fact that the melody of "Spellbound" by Siouxsie And The Banshees is also part of the overall product. In terms of content, it explores the question of what it feels like to live your life and not just survive.

Eclectic mix of songs
The Grammy-winning hit single "Die With A Smile" with Bruno Mars was also already known in advance and is given album honors here once again. The 14 songs feature Gaga at her disco best, as we have come to expect from the New Yorker's classic albums. Musically, she doesn't make a murderer's row out of her musical heart and - as in the past - is uninhibitedly oriented towards the catchy beats of her idol Madonna. The 80s shine through above all in "Killah", for which she collaborated with French DJ Gesaffelstein. "Perfect Celebrity" is a relaxed treatise on the darker side of fame, and "Shadow Of A Man" can be interpreted as an anthem of self-empowerment. Time and again there are treatises on experiences and life situations that the artist has been confronted with in recent years. However, this is not forced and biting, but poured into different tracks in an extremely light-footed manner.

The genesis behind this is linked to a lot of positivism. On the one hand, she already emphasized last year that she had written some of the best songs she could remember. On the other hand, the creation process was immense fun for her and she was able to conquer some inner demons. The openly displayed, sonic eclecticism is not least due to her profound love of music in general. "The answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find my peace in love," she told Rolling Stone in an interview about the new work, "there are sonic moments where we've really taken the sound to the extremes, others are full of peace and calm. For that reason, the album offers a little bit of everything - an all-encompassing experience."

Still firmly on the throne
As she did for "Joanne" (2016) and the soundtrack to "A Star Is Born" (2018), Gaga went to Rick Rubin's Shangri-La studios for the recordings. Between a lot of partying and calming moments full of intimacy, there are a lot of bends to negotiate and surprises to discover on the 14-song album, which lasts almost an hour. "Mayhem" may not reflect the unspent freshness of their old dance-pop albums, but for a "back to basics" record, the sound concoction works brilliantly. The influences of the French electronic scene and the turn to industrial sounds do the product more than good. The heirs to the throne may be pawing their hooves, but Queen Gaga won't be knocked off her pedestal so easily.