A faraway look entered Girl Gaga’s eyes close to the top of a dialog I had together with her in Santa Monica late final yr. I’d requested the pop famous person, whose Las Vegas residency “Jazz & Piano” had just lately concluded, whether or not she would possibly revive the present in some unspecified time in the future; the query led her to muse for a second on her relationship to style — extra particularly, on her repute as an artist all the time wanting to strive her hand at a brand new one.
“And to fall in love with it,” she added. “I mean, the thing I missed the most when I left New York City when I was younger was the community of people I grew up with on the Lower East Side. And in that community, your references — what you learned, what you talked about when you went out, what you emulated in your performances — that was the way you communicated.”
Three months after our chat, which occurred as Gaga was placing the ending touches on her newest studio album, I can see why the previous days had been on her thoughts: “Mayhem,” which got here out Friday, is teeming with affectionate references to the likes of David Bowie, Blondie, 9 Inch Nails, New Order and Stylish; it additionally alludes to earlier songs by Girl Gaga, not least her 2009 smash “Bad Romance,” which echoes by a number of of her new tracks.
“I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them,” she instructed Leisure Weekly when requested a few viral stan meme that claims she’s “reheating her own nachos” within the album’s “Abracadabra.”
Certainly, this self-mythologizing fits a large of 2010s pop whose music has formed her inheritors as clearly as stuff by Bowie, Prince and Madonna formed her. However recycling is a tempting gambit when inspiration begins working skinny — one technique to shore up a sagging fan base round an LP that exists primarily to justify a tour (which is the place the actual cash is as of late).
That method has proved ineffective these days for a few of Gaga’s Obama-era friends, together with Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry. Each launched albums final yr explicitly framed as returns to type; each flopped. For a minute there it appeared fairly shaky for Gaga, too: “Disease,” the original-recipe opener of “Mayhem,” peaked at No. 27 on Billboard’s Sizzling 100 — not precisely a hoped-for comeback after a couple of years during which she targeted on appearing and made a few jazz data. What’s extra, the large success of “Die With a Smile,” her plush throwback duet with Bruno Mars, prompt that she’s considered at age 38 as having reached the adult-contemporary part of her profession, by no means to revisit the edgier dance-pop of her youth.
“Mayhem” places the misinform that concept: Brash, squirmy, stuffed with detailed grooves and expertly crafted hooks, it’s a successful reclamation of her trademark sound — her finest since 2011’s “Born This Way” and exactly the album you’d need her to drop earlier than headlining Coachella, as Girl Gaga will do subsequent month.
This isn’t her first try to faucet into the vitality that made her a star. “Chromatica,” from 2020, was positioned as a sort of corrective to the classic-rock experimentation of 2016’s “Joanne” (which itself was positioned as a corrective to the perceived excesses of 2013’s “Artpop”). But “Chromatica’s” disco excursions had been largely misplaced to the pandemic, and anyway “Mayhem” is extra luckily timed, with Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan having introduced coloration and pageantry again to the High 40 after an extended stretch of whispery gloom and Charli XCX having revived the so-called indie-sleaze aesthetic that after dominated Gaga’s beloved Decrease East Facet.
Additionally: “Mayhem” is healthier than “Chromatica” — extra tuneful, extra coherent, actually extra enjoyable. The songs are about all of the ways in which love and intercourse and stardom overlap, however even when she’s singing about being devoured — “Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high / Sit in the front row, watch the princess die” — she seems like she’s having a blast. Working with a group of producers together with Cirkut, Andrew Watt and Gesaffelstein, she masses up the songs with juicy bass traces and squealing electrical guitar as she cycles by a battery of kooky accents and vocal tics. “Killah” interpolates a lick from Bowie’s “Fame”; “Perfect Celebrity” nods to NIN’s industrial funk; “Zombieboy” evokes the fizzy Champagne excessive that Stylish discovered the way to bottle.
“I’ve been feeling this familiar feeling / Like I’ve known you my whole life,” she tells a lover in “Garden of Eden,” which borrows an immediately identifiable whoa-oh-oh from “Bad Romance.” The welcome trick she pulls off on “Mayhem” is how alive the reminiscence feels.