When Lady Gaga started making her new album Mayhem, she felt the dark, ominous energy of her first two albums — The Fame Monster and Born This Way — luring her back in.
“It was really powerful,” she says on a recent call with Rolling Stone. “Maybe the last four or so albums I’ve made, I moved away from that and tried some different things, but this was a return to those Gothic dreams.”
Across Mayhem, Gaga taps into haunting aesthetic and sounds the that fans fell in love with when she was swallowing rosaries and posing with corpses early in her career. The lyrics and videos for “Abracadabra” and “Disease” alluded to that, but they also represent a more refined Gaga with 16 years, 14 Grammys, and now seven albums of experience.
“I wanted to traverse old ground while breaking new ground, which I think is hard to do,” she says of Mayhem. “There are a few moments on the album where some people might say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of this,’ because I do have a style, but I made an effort musically to push myself to a new place.”
She points to “Killah,” an industrial funk track with Gesaffelstein, as her proudest song. She sneaks an eerie love song toward the end of the album with “Blade of Grass” about her fiancé Michael Polansky’s proposal. And she honors the late Rick Genest, or Zombie Boy, by naming a song after the emblematic Born This Way model.
Bare-faced, with her hair in pigtails, and cozied up under a sprawling blanket, Gaga spoke to Rolling Stone about facing her insecurities, and why she made Mayhem an album about finding resilience amidst chaos.
Congratulations on Mayhem. Was there a specific song that pushed you out of your comfort zone here?
Probably “Killah.” I love the production on it so much. The only live instrument on the whole record is a guitar, and it is just so much fun. It is so confident. But it was unlike any feel or groove that I’d ever worked on before. And also the truth is, I’m not that confident all the time. I’m someone who definitely can feel deeply insecure, but on that record, it’s like peak confidence. And that’s part of the journey of Mayhem as one night out. If you think of the album as one whole night, it’s like that moment in the night when you’re just feeling your best.
When I saw the tracklist, it moved me that Zombie Boy [the model and artist Rick Genest who appears in the ‘Born This Way’ video] inspired a song title. Rest in peace. Tell me about that song.
I think that Rick just was an inspiring person. And when I was working on this song, which is ultimately a big celebration song, that word just popped into my head. And that song is all about the moment in the night when you and your friends all realize that you’re going to wake up not feeling well the next day because you’re having too much fun, so it’s about being a zombie in the morning. But I think that, of course, he was such an inspiration.
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In a Rolling Stone interview in 2010, you described making Born This Way as baking a cake with bitter jelly. You said, “The message of the new music is now more bitter than it was before because the sweeter the cake, the more bitter the jelly can be.” I’m wondering how you see Mayhem in that sort of analogy.
It makes a lot of sense even today because there’s something dark underneath the record, there’s an undercurrent of something uncomfortable that’s hard to deal with. Born This Way was much more of an album about social justice. Mayhem, to me, is ultimately about resilience and also chaos. We need to be resilient through chaos. So it’s both. I do think I explored more sonically with bitterness on this album in a way that maybe I didn’t with some of my earlier records.
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You mentioned that the album reflects you today. How would you describe 2025 Lady Gaga?
I would say 2025 Lady Gaga is really inside of her artistry. I’m a lot more relaxed. I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I’ve fully integrated, I’m both Lady Gaga and Stefani at the same time. And that’s a different feeling. I used to always feel like I was playing two different people and I would crash when I was doing either. Now, I really feel like myself. I went down to this bar in New York the other day and I used to write music on napkins in the middle of the day there when I was like 19 or 20 years old, which I know is too young to be in a bar, but I was. I used to go back and visit and I would feel sad and almost far away from my community and what I built there. And it would almost just feel like lifetimes ago. This last week when I went, it was the most intact that I had felt in a long time, and that was really nice. It was nice to be there. When I feel creatively fulfilled, that’s when I feel most myself.
And the idea of you maybe reclaiming a little bit of who you once were.
For sure, and also having a full life. I have a full life with my partner and my family. And all of those things are just, they made the experience of going back really positive instead of just feeling like a different world.
You end the album with two love songs: “Blade of Grass” and “Die With a Smile.” It’s like a happy ending.
Yes, yes. And the first love song, “Blade of Grass” is a lot more eerie and tense. I wrote it after Michael proposed to me. But the song was about a memory that I had of us standing in the backyard and he said, “When I propose to you,” he said, “what am I supposed to do?” And I said, “You can just wrap a blade of grass around my finger in the backyard.” And I said, “I’ll say yes.” But in that backyard, in our home, so many things have happened. It was the memory of the past haunting me and the loss of friends, the loss of loved ones. I had a friend that got married in my backyard who died of cancer. So I was remembering that this happy moment and this happy thing in my life also was happening in a place where it was a bittersweet moment where I was reflecting on that, too.
So it was eerie, tense, really ominous chords. But then “Die With A Smile” is really hopeful, dreamy, and classic, and that’s where the mayhem ultimately ends. The beauty of the album is that the mayhem doesn’t repeat. It ends.
