After five years away from the pop scene, Lady Gaga is back at long last with her long-awaited seventh studio album, Mayhem, out now via Interscope Records.
Diving headfirst back into a pop-focused sound, Gaga brings in a new suite of production collaborators — including Andrew Watt, Cirkut and her fiancé Michael Polansky — to reconfigure her signature sound into a modern context. The result is a wide-ranging, often chaotic blur of genres, where Gaga oscillates between disco (the groovy “Zombieboy”), industrial (“Killah,” featuring French producer Gesaffelstein), rock (the raucous early stand-out “Perfect Celebrity”) and pure dace-pop (“Garden of Eden”).
In an interview with Billboard on Thursday (March 6), Gaga broke down her inspirations for the album, saying that she wanted to bring “chaos” to the pop scene. “There have been times in my career where I had an idea in terms of how to conceptually approach a record. But I would say that this album, from start to finish, was like pieces coming together,” she said. “I did not want to turn it into anything artificial, I really wanted to allow myself to just follow the music. By doing that, it started to slowly remind me of my earlier work.”
The album comes on the heels of a massively successful 2025 for Gaga. “Die With a Smile,” her world-dominating collaboration with Bruno Mars, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for five of this year’s 10 weeks, making the single her second-longest-reigning No. 1 hit after 2011’s “Born This Way.” Gaga ended up winning a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance alongside Mars.
Check out Lady Gaga’s Mayhem below:
