To promote her new album, Lady Gaga has taken a comedy lie detector test, named her favourite British snacks and eaten increasingly spicy chicken wings on camera. It isn’t 2009 anymore; the rules for selling yourself are radically different than those that applied in an era in which you could throw together a shiny, semi-naked cover for Rolling Stone and then call it a day. Everyone, from Ariana Grande to Donald Duck, partakes in the hot-wings-and-short-form-video rodeo now. But there’s still something a bit jarring about Gaga doing it – eyebrows bleached, dressed like a wedding cake, dabbing the chicken sweats from her brow. Here is an artist who has spent years in the musical abyss, detaching herself from contemporary culture in the process, suddenly strapped into its most conventional churn.
Gaga, at one point in time the hungriest and most sonically thrilling performer of her generation, has benefited enormously from the landscape of critical poptimism that emerged in her wake. In an era in which even pop’s most staid acts – your Tate McRaes or Benson Boones – tend to inspire breathless critical appraisals, few have talked loudly about Gaga’s decade of diminishing returns. The milquetoast power ballads. The old-timer cosplay of her collaborations with Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger. The nonsense storytelling of Chromatica, her Covid-era album inspired by a fictional planet of “kindness punks” and repetitive dance music. The resulting impact of these uncomfortable, converging factors suggests that she got lost as an artist – eager to move past the electrifying freakiness of her early pop, but too nervous to push boundaries anywhere else.
Why, then, does Gaga’s new record – the unambiguously titled Mayhem – feel so promising? Is it because its first two singles, the industrial-leaning “Disease” and “Abracadabra”, are particularly strong? That’s debatable. But Gaga herself seems engaged and present in a way we haven’t seen in a while, discussing her work with pride and excitement, rather than detached pontificating. Most importantly, she seems to have acknowledged that the last decade of her output was fraught and (to some, at least) unsatisfying. She’s not quite out of the weeds just yet, but seems to at least have a torch to see with.
“Abracadabra” is a grower, a whirlwind of house, Siouxsie Sioux goth pop and unadulterated camp. Holding it back from total greatness are the moments that gesture towards Gaga pastiche, the “amor-oo-na-na” and “morta-oo-ga-ga” of its chorus, riffs on the guttural gibberish she perfected on “Bad Romance”. But the track’s production is thrilling and gorgeously erratic, Gaga at the centre of swirling synths and thudding bass. Her vocals, too, fly in all directions, climaxing in Gaga going full opera diva. It’s interesting, and the Gaggiest of Gaga singles since at least 2013’s “GUY” – arguably her last successful collision of sledgehammer electropop and slinky, menacing eroticism.
This week, on the US radio station Sirius XM and in conversation with music journalist Zane Lowe, Gaga has spoken about her unease in returning to this kind of material. “I did not realise how afraid I was to make this record,” she said on Sirius. “I thought I didn’t have it in me, [that] the kind of music I started making early in my career was something I’d left behind.”
To Lowe, she elaborated further: “I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time even though I had it in me. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. I wanted to constantly be a student and not just reinvent myself but learn something new with every record. That wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me.”
The problem with this, though, was that Gaga has rarely transcended the experiments in sound she’s been so eager to dive into. Whether in duets with Bennett or during her dabbles in country on her Joanne record (or, for the five people who listened to it, the Joker 2-inspired Harlequin album that saw her cover old jazz and pop standards), Gaga tends to directly emulate rather than lightly pinch from. The magic of her first studio albums – the dazzling cyborg-pop of The Fame and its eerier follow-up The Fame Monster; the Berghain-ready chaos of Born This Way – was that she picked up pre-existing sounds and then Gagafied them, increasing the drama, the anarchy, that propulsive sense of danger that made her so intoxicating to watch and listen to. Then she stopped. The crushing disappointment of Harlequin, for instance, was that it was quite literally a covers album, sans bells, whistles or idiosyncratic flourishes. The over-25s category of The X Factor used to produce one of those things every year or so.
In her Lowe interview, Gaga spoke to feeling trapped within the Lady Gaga persona for much of her career, burdened by expectations – from fans, label execs and critics – about who Lady Gaga ought to be. So it makes sense why she’d run away from much of it, finding a safety net in work that was more conventional, less polarising, less ambitious. And, often, with people that she wasn’t at all in direct competition with – Bennett, Jagger, A Star Is Born’s Bradley Cooper, even the vaguely plodding Bruno Mars, her collaborator on last year’s middle-of-the-road megahit “Die with a Smile”. No wonder her forever-teased sequel to 2009’s “Telephone” never got off the ground: pairing up with Beyoncé again would only expose the wild divergence of their creative trajectories in the years since.
But it’s an enormous relief to see Gaga unafraid of pop once more, and of revisiting a time in her life when the music she produced sounded as if it had been tossed into a blender, then tussled with and transmogrified. We’ve heard, over and over, Gaga promote new albums with proclamations that she’s found herself again, that she’s emerged from a cocoon of self-doubt and insecurity. Perhaps it’s delusional to still believe her. But something about Mayhem does feel different, in its bend to the chaotic and flamboyant, and in Gaga’s passionate, oddly moving sense of pride over it. No one could tear so enthusiastically into a plate of hot wings for a project made half-heartedly.
‘Mayhem’ is released on 7 March
