Mayhem: A songbook of desire, loss and chaos.
9.0
Credit: Streamline/Interscope
It turns out the album for our times doesn’t address those in power, it aims for liberation.
It’s our second 9.0 of the 2025! That means it’ll be in contention for Album of the Year.
Mayhem was made for these wild times. Urgent, chaotic and sinuous; a true reflection of 2025. “And when the world needed her most, she returned” writes user @Triairius on the bewitching video for ‘Abracadabra’. 256,000 other little monsters agree, and they’re right. Fascists are ruling America, trans people are being castigated at every turn, and the world economy is on the brink of turmoil. For Mother Monster, it’s familiar geo-political territory, given that she emerged in the wake of the Great Recession. Just a shame then that this time things are a tad more authoritarian.
It’s exceptional just how much has changed even in the 2 months since release day. If you can believe it, Trudeau resigned, the Gaza ceasefire fell through, Signalgate got exposed, Trump imposed his tariffs, the UK became dangerously more transphobic, and the Pope died, all since the 7th March. Never has there been a better time to name an album Mayhem. Never before have we needed pop music made on the same principles as Gaga’s early material: to provide an electrifying, camp-as-fuck antidote to the poison that capitalism has wrought into everything.
All of which was on display over the last fortnight at Coachella. If you haven’t had a taste of Gaga’s jaw-dropping headliner set, stop reading this and find one of the pirate links to watch it. The Art of Personal Chaos is something akin to Don Giovanni and Moulin Rouge on steroids. A storey-high ball gown, dancing skeletons, angels, demons, chessboards, graveyards; it has to be seen to be believed. As the outside world bends to the whims of Hitler-fanboys and billionaires, Gaga doubles down on just what a singular force of camp and drama she can be.
It was whilst watching her on livestream – quite the way to spend Easter, I must say – that I finally saw her full vision. Mayhem is internal chaos. Blood and violence, a mix of torment and allure, sex and destruction. The stresses of a world tending towards infinity on its march to conservatism. The strain of fame versus the overwhelming desire to be a popstar. There is no middle ground – “Dance, or die”, quite literally.
“Mayhem is internal chaos…There is no middle ground – “Dance, or die”, quite literally.”
In aesthetic, it may well have the hallmarks of the Alexander McQueen-draped, runway-breaking body c**t of The Fame Monster and Born This Way. But this is by far and away Gaga’s most explorative and free-moving record to date, a mark of her artistic advancement and the towering multi-decade back catalogue she now sits atop of. In her interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, she notes how she tried not to give Mayhem “an outfit” as she had done with previous work. On first listen, long time fans will be surprised by the sheer variety of styles here. Big glitzy eighties club sounds meet sex-driven leather-clad rock attitude, the tracklisting packing colossal dancefloor bangers, sonorous power ballads, and guitars galore. All are arranged under Gaga’s new Romulan x gothic opera wardrobe. This is high drama, a songbook laced with loss, desire and chaos, so outward and so iconoclast in its confidence, and it reaches unfathomable levels of gay.
Us queers need drama of course, but the album’s emotions are deeply personal. Gaga creates much of her music by channeling personal struggle. Mayhem runs it fierce and raw, unafraid of not giving positive resolution. Her past work has resolved to find victory at some point, but here, for the first time, there’s an acceptance of the inevitable. It’s okay to live with heartbreak and to be weighed down with loss. Perhaps not all chaos needs fixing, and when so much of it exists in constant pull between her personal and public life, to resolve it would be to lose oneself. The Art Of Personal Chaos certainly said as much.
In taking this path, she burnishes the same sense of doom that has underlain many of Pop’s greatest talents – Prince’s visions of the apocalypse; the threat of faceless, uniformed oppression in MJ’s later output; the cataclysm of heartbreak that Madonna lays out in spades. Gaga’s own fire and ferocity has exuded similar traits up to now, but Mayhem is its most explicit utilisation yet.
“In taking this path, she burnishes the same sense of doom that has underlain many of Pop’s greatest talents…”
What better a time to make an album with that attitude. Gaga’s never been explicitly political in her songwriting, but until women and queer people are no longer political identities, her work will remain inherently political. 2025 is proving to be a turning point in human history, a return to RealPolitik and the mainstreaming of fascist ideals. The world is ending, at least as we’ve known it, and before we start deciding what comes next, we’re faced with tumult and grieving what we’ve been forced to leave. Surviving that requires honesty. So, as she has always done so well, Gaga translates her own personal struggles into music that all those affected can find affinity in. Mayhem isn’t escapism, it’s liberation. It’s not a place to forget, it’s a place to release.
It’s the strength of the album’s fundamentals that allow it to zip so freely from genre to genre, and why a record that starts with the starship-sized synths of ‘Disease’ can end with the melancholic singer-songwriter duet of ‘Die With A Smile’ (boy did that one grown on me now that it’s an album closer). Her boundless personality, perhaps shining at its brightest ever, means that, despite the darkness, Mayhem’s drama makes it a thrillride and not an exhumation. Gaga has become more mature, for sure, but her sense of fun is unaffected, and the tracklisting elicits big smiles and plenty of head-bopping.
Indeed, few cuts on here couldn’t make it as a Drag Race Lipsync For Your Life, which, for my straight readers, is very high praise indeed. In particular, I’d implore the show’s producers to get ‘Vanish Into You’ at earliest convenience. Find me belting that one out next time I’m at a karaoke night; a soaring, heartfelt letter to the Gaga we grew up with, and what it means to love oneself. It’s magnificent.
“…few cuts on here couldn’t make it as a Drag Race Lipsync For Your Life, which, for my straight readers, is very high praise indeed.”
It’s hard not to hear ‘Abracadabra’ at the moment, especially if you’re around me, a monster of a single that encapsulates the world-ending urgency of the album. Thumping drums, so loud that they’re almost comical, torrent gigawatts of energy into your chosen soundsystem. The urge to try matching the exceptional choreography of the video is entrancing, as everything rushes towards finality with unstoppable force. Far from writing a song that could be called ‘like her old material’, she’s renewed her early sound for a new decade, and proven why it was so fucking good in the first place.
The rest of the tracklisting has ones for every mood. ‘Garden Of Eden’ runs closest to her breakthrough material, horny, messy and down bad. ‘Killah’, one of the many cuts made with the industrial touch of Gessaffelstein’s production, is pure mid-noughties Prince sexiness, reminiscent of him and Lenny Kravitz’s cover of ‘American Woman’, and just as addictive. ‘ZombieBoy’, paying tribute to the late Rick Genest, employs a gold-plated reading of the Contemporary R&B of Evelyn King and Patrice Rushen, whilst Yazoo-inspired ‘How Bad Do U Want Me’ pulls off the same fusion of 80s and 2010s that Taylor Swift nailed on 1989. ‘The Beast Inside’, meanwhile, leaves its lyrics open enough to place whatever internal struggle you fancy in it, one of the many talents that has made Gaga such a personal love for so many of us.
“‘Killah’…is pure mid-noughties Prince sexiness, reminiscent of him and Lenny Kravitz’s cover of ‘American Woman’, and just as addictive.”
As Robert Sheffiled wrote, it’s “hard to remember a world where we didn’t have Gaga.” Her arrival has become such a hardpoint in the culture of the 21st century, a true before and after moment, and the bastion of recession pop. She carried the evolution of the artist in the digital age away from clicking on a MySpace page to memeing her latest runway outfit and referencing her music videos in comment sections. In my mind, she has always been destined to go down as one of the greats. But, to truly place her next to the loftiest of her predecessors – the Kylies, Jacksons and Madonnas – has required her to maintain the innovation she broke through with, and to build the discography to match theirs.
That wait is over. It ended at 1am PST on the 19th April 2025, when she closed her Coachella week 2 headliner and proved that we hadn’t all been imagining the one from the week before. It’s one thing to still be pulling crowds 20 years into the business, but to be wowing on the scale that she is, somehow reaching highs never seen before, yet still winking that “you haven’t seen anything yet”, is final proof that she is one of the greatest to ever do it.
There’s a lot of familiarity between Mayhem and Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor, both records drawing from their creators roots, the sounds that made them a hit in the first place, and coming attached with culture-defining tours. What we might be about to witness with The Mayhem Ball might leave the world we know now unrecognisable.
“She’s not here to save the world. She points steadfast towards the apocalypse, and tells you to dance.”
Then again, we’re living in times where previous weeks regularly seem unrecognisable by the Wednesday after. Gaga is making music made for this age. She’s explicit in her intentions – this album isn’t here to recreate past success, it’s here to renew old vows, and remind us of the power of Mother Monster’s liberation-through-massive-gay-beats manifesto. It’s a soundtrack for personal chaos, and the drawl of surviving in the world we find ourselves in. She’s not here to save the world. She points steadfast towards the apocalypse, and tells you to dance.
We’re past the point of comfort, or pretending that things aren’t as serious as they are. We need something gayer than ever before to cling on to in the fight against the fascists. Mayhem is a songbook of desire, loss and chaos. An expression of her near-fundamentalist desire to find happiness in performance, matched with the turmoil of stardom and what it has taken her to reach this point. A story that translates onto where the world is right now, as we come to terms with just how much is changing, and how hard the future is going to be. Its musicality collages both territories well-worn and those unexplored, all dressed to serve c**t on the dancefloor, or to be sung in front of your bedroom mirror. It is at once everything that we love Gaga for and everything that she has become. A pop symphony that only one of the greatest of all time could pull off, and it’s just in time. We’ve never needed her more.
Score: 9.0/10
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