What’s most notable here is how happy—or, at least, not miserable—Gaga sounds here. Her previous electropop records, 2013’s Artpop and 2020’s Chromatica, were by turns cynical and perfunctory. “Perfect Celebrity” plumbs similar territory as Chromatica’s “Plastic Doll,” but with new clarity and resolution. “You love to hate me / I’m the perfect celebrity,” Gaga snarls in one of MAYHEM’s biggest moments. It sounds like she loves it, too—not in a self-hating way, but in a way that suggests a renewed love of the game. “Garden Of Eden” and pre-release single “Abracadabra” work similarly, evoking welcome comparisons to her earlier pop work. Nothing new on MAYHEM has the earworm immediacy of “Telephone” or “Poker Face,” but the songcraft is undeniable and the product feels thoughtful.
Occasionally, the sounds are a bit too polished for the effect Gaga is going for. She delves into disco and 1980s funk here, two genres she’s nodded to in the past. This artist working in this medium should be pure excess, but instead it’s mostly nipped right as it gets going. “Killah,” a collaboration with producer Gesaffelstein, evokes Prince’s ’80s work, but only as much as it evokes the mathematical precision of St. Vincent. “Zombieboy,” a legitimately fun track that could believably be a Chic cut, halts right as it gets cooking. Perhaps it’s the deliberate work of a master performer to leave us wanting more, but the strict adherence to three-and-a-half-minute runtimes is a little strange when everything else is screaming disco.
This precision connects more enjoyably when MAYHEM is going for straightforward ’80s pop riffs. “LoveDrugs” finds Gaga stepping into a Pat Benatar lane, a combination that makes such obvious sense that it’s hard to believe she’s just exploring it now. “Don’t Call Tonight” leans into reggae-lite stylings reminiscent of Blondie. More successful is “Vanish Into You,” a soaring ballad that finds Gaga making a melodramatic meal out of the melody. These tracks are exceedingly competent, even if they do tend to bleed together. Surprise standout “How Bad Do U Want Me” is a shockingly accurate Taylor Swift pastiche, albeit sung like Lady Gaga. That it’s such a convincing riff on the 1989 formula is a reminder that while Gaga spent the better part of the 2010s deliberately choosing not to make this kind of down-the-middle pop, she totally could have. There is hardly a pop formula she can’t crack.
On MAYHEM, that fact can be as much of a detriment as a brag. Too often, it feels like Lady Gaga doing funk or an ’80s power ballad as opposed to a Lady Gaga song. Even “Abracadabra,” one of the album’s best tracks, feels like Lady Gaga referencing “Bad Romance,” a comparison that the real “Bad Romance” never had to deal with. There are no outright flops here, but historically flops have still told us something new about Gaga. (See: some of Artpop’s more out-there swings.) MAYHEM exists to remind us of things that were never in doubt: that Gaga has a gift for pastiche and that she is the best at her job. But it largely doesn’t expand our understanding of the icon or artist in a way that others like Madonna or Beyoncé were still building toward as their careers passed the 15-year mark.
The adjective that becomes most pertinent is perhaps the opposite of “mayhem”: content. This is made explicit on the beautiful “Blade Of Grass,” a ballad inspired by Gaga’s fiancé, Michael Polansky. Gaga imagines a blade of grass not just as a wedding ring but “a cast” and imagines a romance without the trappings of fame and money. What “Blade Of Grass” makes explicit, more than the album’s two other ballads, “Vanish Into You” or “Die With A Smile,” is the changing of priorities. Gaga told Vogue back in September that it was Polansky who asked her to make a pop record. It’s one hell of a wedding present, and it explains why she sounds far happier here than on recent pop records. Time seems to have softened Gaga. Maybe the striving to define herself is over; maybe it’s not. But she’s clearly happy with where she is now.
