A time-warping synth beats across the dancefloor, compelling her monsters to dance. Flickering lights obscure chiseled bodies as they lurch toward the pulsing, blood-red heart. Their grotesque lifeforms, vested in chains, lace, leather, and fur, live and breathe this moment. Waking up to the pearlescent full moon, they let out a guttural cry of hunger. The darkness of dance ignites a primal urge for movement. The monsters gyrate erratically—now set loose upon the stage to wreak havoc and spread Mayhem.
The album Mayhem is set to be unleashed May 7th.
Mother Monster, Lady Gaga, has returned to dance-pop after a decade of performing jazz, soft rock, and Americana; a Chromatica era hindered by COVID; and starring in several movies, including House of Gucci, A Star is Born, and Joker: Folie à Deux. This uncanny musical ghost sighting shocked the internet and the Grammys audience during a Mastercard commercial which, instead of featuring a cheesy ad about things that are “priceless,” debuted Gaga’s music video to “Mayhem.” The category is “Dance or Die,” Gaga announced, dressed in a pointy-shouldered, red leather, voodoo-dolled cloak and a large circular red hat resembling a prickly pear.
The album Mayhem is set to be unleashed May 7th.
“The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” Gaga has said.
And her new music video does not disappoint; it’s completely different from anything she has ever done. The ensemble, dressed in bare white tops and matching white leggings, contrasts Gaga, who evokes a bloody overseer of this deathly dance competition. Utter Mayhem consumes the stage as bodies writhe in pleasure, and a haunting chorus of “AB-RACADABRA-ABRACADA-A-A-BRA” echoes across the floor.
The avant-garde Gaga of yore is back. She is no longer the fame-obsessed popstar alter ego bleeding out on the stage of the 2009 VMA’s; instead, she embodies the corrosive nature of fame and its casualties: blood, pain, and pleasure.
With her return comes the square wave synths and rhythmic spoken word refrains made iconic by “Telephone’s” line, “Out in the club and I’m sippin’ that bub/ And you’re not gonna reach my telephone (No)”. This more chaotic sound came to Gaga as she began to tap into her darker side, “searching for her inner demon.”
Gaga suffers because she wants what she cannot have, and judging by her new era, the only cure is dance.
This past fall, Gaga teased her Halloween single “Disease” through a cryptic internet scavenger hunt, ending with its official release by Interscope Records on October 25th. The song centers around the Buddhist idea that “desire is the root of all suffering.” Gaga, who takes on the guise of a black bile-spewing, raven-esque plague doctor, offers the listener solace in their sickness, singing, “Bring me your desire/ I can cure your disease.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gaga said, “Disease is about facing the madness that resides within us… to fix this addict-like affliction that you have for [something].”
Gaga suffers because she wants what she cannot have, and judging by her new era, the only cure is dance.
The track is laden with simple repetition and danceable lines such as “Lay you down like one, two, three/eyes roll back in ecstasy” and “(Ah-ah) Screamin’ for me, baby/ (Ah-ah) Like you’re gonna die.”
Despite the positive critical reception, which praised the new sound as a return to roots, and Rolling Stone naming the song as the 17th best song of 2024, “Disease” did not make a large impact on the charts. It only reached the top 40 on Billboard Hot 100.
However, the charts were not out of reach, as Gaga’s duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With A Smile,” became her first top-ten hit in over four years since the 2020 release of “Rain on Me” with Ariana Grande. For “Die With A Smile,” Gaga and Mars took home the Grammy for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
While Gaga and Mars did not perform “Die With A Smile”—which won the grammy for best Pop Duo/Group performance that night—at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, they sang a cover of “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas & the Papas in a tribute to the duo’s hometown suffering and recovering from the Southern California wildfires. Their voices blended together in a haunting call to action for climate justice. The Grammys generated over 24-million dollars in wildfire relief funds through a partnership with the charity MusiCares.
In a twisted example of art imitating life, the LA Wildfires are an embodiment of Gaga’s Mayhem. In an interview with Elle, Gaga said, “It was hard at first to name the album Mayhem because I so much don’t want that feeling to be real.”
Through the process of dealing with her own personal mayhem, Gaga has hope for the recovery of her LA community through the benefits of music.
“I’m also somebody that is a dreamer, but what I think I ultimately arrived at is it’s all of the fractures of who we are and the fractures in the world and the mayhem of that brokenness that ultimately teaches us the power of joy, and dancing and crying and laughing and listening to music and holding your friends and your family and repeat!” Gaga said.