“Phantom of the dancefloor, come to me!” calls Lady Gaga on her single “Abracadabra”. And lo! The defiant freakazoid electropop spirit of her 2008 debut, The Fame, fills the sagging inflatable doll of the last decade’s safer musical choices and slumping sales. Huge big lungfuls of synth and guitar hooks reanimate her limbs. Dark, gnarly lyrics knowingly contort pop cliches into kinky PVC shapes. Nonsense syllables breathe into the beats, which throb on and on until Gaga is standing upright again in all her bleach-browed, platform-heel stomping glory. Bow down, little monsters! For her sixth studio album, Mayhem hails the return of your Mama Monster to all her shock-horror-bop glory.
Interviewed by Zane Lowe for Apple Music, the artist born Stefani Germanotta said this is an album on which she rejoices in her own “personal mayhem” and the defiant brand-disrupting choices she’s made in a “non-linear career”. With her wave-crasher of a voice, she flooded the full gamut of emotion into big band jazz standards with Tony Bennett, and won an Oscar for the middle-of-the-road country rock she made with Bradley Cooper in 2018. I’ve got a real soft spot for A Star is Born’s unashamedly melodramatic piano ballad, “Shallow”. But there’s no denying those recordings saw her working within genre convention. The sound she found on The Fame and returns to now on Mayhem, though, is all her own.
It opens with single “Disease”, which sets the compellingly wonky pace and showcases Gaga’s commanding vocal range. Lurching through the octave, she promises both poison and cure, sweet seduction and lolling abandonment. There’s further temptation on “Garden of Eden”, on which she beckons listeners out to a party where “You start to slur and, and I start to squeal/ I'm fallin’ over in my nine-inch heels.”
If this all sounds bang on trend – in line with the messy hedonism of Charli XCX’s 2024 conquering Brat – then it only goes to show how the formative, “f*** it” influence of The Fame has been bubbling up through the charts ever since. On “Perfect Celebrity”, Gaga points to her own status as a pop icon, describing herself as “made of plastic … You love to hate me … Choke on the fame and hope it gets you high/ Sit in the front row, watch the princess die.” It’s the angriest song she’s ever written, she told Lowe, seemingly at odds with previous confessions of fame-lusting ambition. Yet she still sounds like she’s relishing it here, over Eighties keyboards that wink at “West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys, those grandmasters of arch pop.
There’s plenty more Seventies disco and Eighties neon to be found. I danced around my kitchen to the pouty, Prince-indebted “Killah”, whose funky guitar flicks quote Bowie’s “Fame”. The bass line on “Zombieboy” echoes the arrogant strut of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug”, while the chorus melody of “Abracadabra” reaches back to that of Tears for Fears’s “Mad World”. Yet there are other, intriguing references: “How Bad Do U Want Me” offers a leather-gloved high five to Yazoo’s “Only You”, but lays its floating narrative style and vocal delivery on Taylor Swift’s shoulder.
There’s certainly more than enough of Gaga’s own distinctive voice here to go around. Hear her roar and sneer over the gurning guitars of “Shadow of a Man”; power through the blow-dried AOR chug of “LoveDrug”; wallow low over the piano in the yearning of “Blade of Grass”.
Gaga’s return to outsider-empowering form could not be more timely. At a moment when America’s leaders seek to shove its marginalised citizens back into the shadows, she invites them back into the centre of the floor, celebrating their defiant differences in the bright strobe lighting. Maga? Oh nah-nah!
