Words by Zachary Masone
What is there to say about Lady Gaga that hasn’t already been said? An Academy Award, six number-one songs on the Billboard Hot 100, fourteen GRAMMYs, countless fashion moments etched into 21st century iconography itself. Lady Gaga is quintessential to and infinitely memorialized within the zeitgeist. She is a voice to the voiceless, a culture creator, a behemoth of biblical proportions. Relevant for upwards of twenty years, and as popular as ever, Lady Gaga ranks among the most iconic musicians of all time. And even after all this time, she continues to seize attention, commanding the cultural conversation to be centered around her.
In the midst of a random commercial break on the night of the 2025 Grammys, a music video premiered: Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra.” She appears, clad in spiked red latex and tapping on a microphone, before uttering “The category is…dance or die.” It’s a scene from the macabre, a Burtonesque nightmare. Gaga stumbles around with a cane in one scene, her face wretched and her movements uncanny. In another, she dances in complete synchronization with a swarm of backup dancers, all clad in white, in the middle of a cavernous, brutalist space. The self-references to music videos like “Bad Romance” and “Alejandro” are explicit and intentional. Gaga has become so iconic, so integral to the musical landscape of the last two decades, that her devotion to her own legacy feels like an essential part of her artistic evolution.
For many, “Abracadabra” was a return to form for Gaga. It harkened back to her earlier work in the late 2000s and early 2010s, with albums like The Fame Monster and Born This Way, not just with the music video, but with the song itself. These albums were ladened with dark, gritty dance-pop – think “Bad Romance,” “Government Hooker,” and “Bloody Mary.” They were categorized by their grunge and grime, their use of synths so sharp they could cut, and heavy kick drums pulsating underneath Gaga’s growling vocals and impeccable melodies. “Abracadabra” fit seamlessly into this established canon, as did the lead single “Disease.” Together, they felt like a triumphant homecoming, a full circle moment to where Gaga had started. The fans, eager for this sound, had long clamored for its return — and Gaga delivered.
But the most fascinating quality of Lady Gaga, the reason why she has become one of the most legendary and celebrated musicians of the century, is her unpredictability. She has never been an artist to rest in comfort; she is a true chameleon, each era distinct and unique from one another. After Born This Way came ARTPOP, with its heavy EDM and techno influence; then Joanne, an amalgamation of rock, country, and Americana; then the A Star is Born soundtrack (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Shallow” with Bradley Cooper); and then Chromatica, a dance-pop and house concept album helmed by producer, BloodPop. This doesn’t include Gaga’s two jazz albums with legend, Tony Bennett, or her accompaniment album to Joker: Folie à Deux, where she covers jazz classics like “Good Morning” and “That’s Entertainment” (Perhaps the less said about this one, the better). These image and sonic shifts are what make Gaga so interesting as an artist. While the music might not have been to everyone’s taste, no one could ever say Gaga was boring or uninspired. For many, she is the essential 21st century pop star, and this trajectory shows no signs of slowing down.
“Abracadabra” was an immediate hit upon release, racking in streams alongside her duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile,” released in late 2024. This track became Gaga’s sixth number-one song, as well as the longest running number-one song on Spotify of all time, at over 145 days. The moment was Gaga’s for the taking, and with it, came MAYHEM, her first studio album in over four years.
MAYHEM is exactly what it sounds like, and nothing what the public expected. It is not only a return to Gaga’s older soundscape, but a foray into a myriad of clashing and complementary genres. On display, Gaga herself specified influences including “90s alternative, electro-grunge, Prince and David Bowie melodies, guitar and attitude, funky bass lines, French electronic music, and analog synthesizers.” And these are all on display throughout the 53 minute runtime. MAYHEM is situated firmly in chaos, in combining decades and genres to create something both referential to Gaga’s past career and forward-thinking, highlighting the direction of her musicality in the future.
The first three tracks, “Disease,” “Abracadabra,” and “Garden of Eden,” are a complete career highlight for Gaga. From the opening line on “Disease,” “There are no more tears to cry” above the hard-thumping beat and heavy bass, to the soft bridge, where Gaga softly sings over a four-chord piano progression before vocalizing a growling belt and letting in the flood of pulsing synths, Gaga is in complete control. “Abracadabra” continues with a similar style of production. This electro-pop dance banger is one of Gaga’s best singles and music videos in years. It melds into her earlier trend of gibberish nonsensical, but extremely catchy lyrics – when she says, “Abracadabra, amor oo nah nah, Abracadabra, morta oo gaga” on the chorus, I can’t help but be reminded of “Rah, rah, ah-ah-ah, roma roma-ma, Gaga, ooh la-la” on Bad Romance or “Judas, Juda-ah-ah, Judas, Juda-ah-ah, Judas, Juda-ah-ah, Judas, Gaga” on Judas, explicitly placing this song into the canon of her earlier work. “Garden of Eden,” the next song on the album, is plucked straight from the late 2000s. Its production is most homogeneous with her earlier collaborations with RedOne, with an overlay of inspiration from Britney Spears’ 2007 classic dance-pop album, Blackout. It’s another career climax from Gaga, one that wouldn’t be far off from her first album, The Fame, and demonstrates her complete pop dominance and prowess.
Her ear for melodies and instantly catchy choruses can be felt all over MAYHEM. “Vanish Into You” brings in the first influences of the 1980s pop and disco that takes over a majority of the tracks on MAYHEM. Gaga croons over a funky bassline, her vocals soaring overhead, “Can I vanish into you?” On the later track, “Don’t Call Tonight,” Gaga begs for a past lover to not come back into her life, while 80s guitars and synths ground the song in the danceable tradition of disco; the song wouldn’t sound out of place on Dua Lipa’s 2020 album, Future Nostalgia. “LoveDrug,” stylized like her 2008 hit “LoveGame,” continues with the 80s influence, with Gaga singing,“I don’t wanna feel, I don’t wanna cry, so I’m gonna dance until I feel alright.” It’s an instantaneous earworm. And while on first listen, these songs are not album highlights, their catchiness makes them worthy inclusions.
The funk and disco influences go even further on tracks like “Killah” and “Zombieboy.” The former is an ode to Prince and Bowie, with a techno, garage breakdown in the middle. The track features legendary producer Gesaffelstein, and in the bridge, as the synths, guitars, and bass loops over and over, an electronic snare begins pouncing as Gaga gutturally cries in the background. It’s an inspired path to take the funk-influenced track, and one that works in the grand scheme of MAYHEM. On “Zombieboy,” disco takes center stage more than any other track on the album. It effortlessly blends the infectious energy of Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” combined with Michael Jackson’s Thriller, complete with an 80s synthesizer solo in the bridge. The bassline could easily have been pulled from a Nile Rodgers production, adding an addictive groove that anchors the entire track. “Shadow of a Man” seems to exist in this vein as well, again with the Michael Jackson references at the forefront. Gaga sings the chorus with the same break-neck inflections as Jackson on songs like “Wanna Be Starting Something” and “Smooth Criminal.” While the earlier singles echoed the sounds of her early work and could be considered a bait-and-switch, Gaga never said that those tracks were representative of the entire album. MAYHEM is about the disarray, the mingling of a thousand influences to situate Gaga in her present state.
And while not every track is an instant classic, like the pseudo-Taylor Swift reject “How Bad Do U Want Me” (which combines the production style of reputation’s “Gorgeous” with the lyricism of 1989’s “Blank Space”) or the penultimate ballad “Blade of Grass,” inspired by her engagement to fiancé Michael Polansky, even the least interesting Gaga songs are more interesting than your average pop star’s. This is because of Gaga herself. The inclusion of Gaga makes a project inherently more compelling; this is the essence of what makes Gaga Gaga. She has a vision, a story. Even her more panned or less successful projects, like the Joker accompaniment album Harlequin, or the ahead of its time ARTPOP, have been included in the mythos. They are all a part of her, a puzzle in the overall composition of the story of Lady Gaga. And I think MAYHEM is a more-than-worthy inclusion into this arrangement. Gaga rummaging through her past has yielded, perhaps ironically, a freshness and a fervor that hasn’t been seen in her music in years. MAYHEM is a delight, a call from a spiked red latex-clad Gaga to dance or to die. And dance, to the disco bass lines, to the gibberish choruses, to the Bowie, Swift, and Prince influences, to the callbacks to The Fame, to the live drums in “Perfect Celebrity,” to the throbbing dance-pop beats, to the bridge in “Die With a Smile,” we will.
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