It’s an LGBTQ+ Music Newsletter So Of Course We’re Reviewing Lady Gaga

And good thing we are! Because ‘Mayhem’ bangs.

• WHY SHE’S HERE: Okay do I really need to explain this one lol

• WHAT’S THE VIBE: Pop icon reclaiming the throne after a decade

• START HERE BUT ALSO KEEP READING: “Garden of Eden,”“Killah,” “Zombieboy,” but also if you haven’t heard “Abracadabra” by now what gay rock do you live under

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Lady Gaga just pulled off an iconic sleight of hand on all of us. You might think based on “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” respectively the second and third singles — and first two tracks — from her long-awaited sixth album, Mayhem, that she’s just reheating her nachos. And I get it: “Disease” sounds a ton like Gaga’s best album, Born This Way, and “Abracadabra” has all the hallmarks of a classic Top 40 Gaga banger. But after these two tracks, Mayhem — which Gaga co-produced alongside: Max Martin associate Cirkut; Andrew Watt, who has worked with Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus; and, occasionally, Gessaffelstein, who helped give Charli XCX’s “B2B” its squelchy thwack — is at once inarguably a Gaga album and not much like her previous work.

Sure, the portion of Mayhem rooted in rock and EDM isn’t exactly reflective of new influences for Gaga, but Mayhem finds the middle ground between Chromatica kind of coalescing into a forgettable blur (minus its singles) and ARTPOP being so all over the place it confused people at first. It breaks new ground while reminding us why Gaga’s music so instantly led her to world domination; it’s catchy and Top 40-ready yet ambitious in its production; and it’s almost entirely composed of simple (and, occasionally, deliberately stupid) lyrics performed so powerfully they sometimes become transcendent.

Anyway, here’s a hot take so I can keep your attention, because loving Mayhem is decidedly not a hot take, everyone loves it: Barring Born This Way, every Gaga album has some songs that feel inessential at best and slightly unbearable at worst. On Mayhem, you don’t get any inessential tracks, especially not in the first half, where a beguiling yet still classically hooky pop-meets-rock sound is the loose uniting factor. I especially love “Killah,” which I expected, based on its Gesaffelstein feature, to sound like throwing your body against a wall repeatedly in a club with blue strobe lights, but instead, we get a synth-funk sound that sounds like — and I am so glad I get to say this — St. Vincent, especially her song “All Born Screaming.” Miraculously, Gaga’s version is significantly better.

“Garden of Eden,” Mayhem’s third track, has the big boom of Born This Way, but it’s ghostlier and more directly intended for radio domination than, say, “Scheiße,” with the invitation “I’ll t-t-t-take you to the garden of Eden” sounding alluring despite ostensibly being vacuous, with rock-ready guitars amping up the power. “Perfect Celebrity” is probably the best song here lyrically — not that “You make me money, I'll make you laugh / You love to hate me / I'm thе perfect celebrity” is saying much new about the nature of fame or using especially poetic language, but it’s refreshing to hear Gaga be this vulnerable. She delivers a nuanced bit of self-reflection while lashing out at music listeners, the music industry, and herself in one fell swoop. It’s really impressive.

Lyrics haven’t necessarily been Gaga’s strong suit on her past few albums, which made it difficult for me to embrace Mayhem’s “LoveDrug” at first despite it obviously slapping. “I just need a dose of the right stuff / I just need a hit of your love drug” from the chorus is about as cliche as it gets, but the chugging guitars, gleaming synths, and dedicated vocal performance made me forget how much these lyrics kinda suck after the fourth or fifth listen. That’s Gaga’s power! I also don’t love the lyrics to “Disease” because “I could play the doctor, I can cure your disease / If you were a sinner, I could make you believe” is kind of the “it’s first grade, Spongebob!” of Gaga lyrics — “I want your ugly / I want your disease” from “Bad Romance” is the better evocation of sickness in Gaga’s catalog. I’m probably being a bit intense about lyrics because I continue to find Gaga’s fictional first-person narratives on Born This Way’s “Bad Kids” and “Hair” incredibly moving, whereas Mayhem excels somewhat more in sound than sentiment.

In any case, Mayhem’s music is so riveting that it often doesn’t matter what Gaga is saying — like, none of us actually know what she’s saying for half the chorus of “Abracadabra,” and that’s the point. It’s a song you just have to sing along to because, well, it’s a top-tier pop song thanks to Gaga’s innate ability to transform the most unpleasant abrasive aspects of EDM into euphoric ragers. “How Bad Do U Want Me,” sounds like, um, Jai Paul produced it, and I love it???? Not on my bingo card for 2025 but so happy it’s here. The early-aughts blog-electronic opening synths, the chorus that at once feels stadium-sized yet relatively scaled-back for Gaga — it’s just perfect, and it’s not even in my top three songs on the album. Neither is “Vanish Into You” despite Gaga’s vocal performance on the chorus being snarling and dramatic, with the guitars, bass, and synths demanding your attention just as strongly. This album is really that good.

There’s nothing tentative about Mayhem: Gaga has rarely sounded this confident since some of ARTPOP’s boldest experiments. Hell, I even came around on “Blade of Grass” in due time, which is objectively a song so corny it might be the only Mayhem track that could reasonably be said to be bad, but she performs it with such gusto and commitment that I like it. Yes, it’s lighters-up ‘70s festival balladry that grates on the ears at first, but it just works, even if ARTPOP’s “Dope” is overall the type of Gaga ballad I prefer. If Mayhem is Gaga revisiting her most successful sounds and expanding from them toward some of her highest highs in ages, “Blade of Grass,” even with its key change that’s nowhere close to “Love on Top” territory (remember when Beyoncé wasn’t yet such a pop monolith that she was still guest-versing on brand-new pop stars’ songs?), is a reminder of why Gaga was such a success in A Star Is Born.

“Blade of Grass” has the LP’s biggest album-closer vibes, and that’s intentional: Gaga’s inescapable Bruno Mars collab “Die With a Smile” was originally intended to be a standalone single but was then tacked onto Mayhem after the song’s massive chart success. When I first heard “Die” back before we even knew Mayhem was even coming, my initial response to it was, “I never need to hear this song again.” Yet by the time Mayhem draws to a close, it’s been such a strong outing from Gaga that you absolutely have to reconsider “Die,” and it’s honestly a great song.

A bunch of smoky indie-rock songs like “Die With a Smile” from Gaga? Now that’s an album I want to hear. But in the meantime, we have Mayhem, which may well, in time, become my favorite Gaga album besides Born This Way. “We about to be up all night, wakin' up a zombie,” she sings on the disco-adjacent highlight “Zombieboy,” a tribute to the late Rick Genest, the skeleton-tattooed tux-wearer in the “Born This Way” video. It’s a call-back to her greatest era with the confidence of someone in her second-greatest era, but it’s also a misdirect. On Mayhem, Gaga has woken up, but not as a fictional being caught between life and death. She’s re-emerged as the most powerful version of herself we’ve seen since her initial spate of world domination. Paws up: Mother Monster is officially back.

Please read this New York Times opinion piece about Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest being the greatest threat to free speech since the Red Scare. I’m not alone in feeling that Khalil’s detention and the circumstances around it — in particular, the fact that he is not being charged with a crime and that it is extraordinarily rare for one’s green card to be revoked — portend the beginning of a major suppression of basic human rights that we urgently need to figure out how to fight back against. And we’ve already lost so many of our rights as it is. Plus, if even the New York Times is allowing its opinion writers to express outrage against the detention of pro-Palestinian student protestors, the tides are clearly shifting.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜