A collection of chaos: Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM review

Hannah Chen | Conant Crier

Lady Gaga is an artist of experimentation, and she’s certainly shown that with her discography. She’s had exciting pop hits like “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” and “Rain On Me” featuring A-List star Ariana Grande, as well as heartfelt ballads like “Die With A Smile,” “Shallow,” and “Always Remember Us This Way.” From 2021 to 2025, she had a three-album run that didn’t follow her common musical styles. She did all jazz, which seems to be a way of tuning back into her older fanbase after such a pop-driven album like Chromatica. Similarly to Chromatica, a project with mainly electronic pop hits, Gaga released an album titled MAYHEM on March 7th, 2025. It includes three pre-release singles that hit the charts as soon as they released: “Disease,” “Die With A Smile” featuring Bruno Mars, and most recently, “Abracadabra,” which was featured in recent March Madness coverage. Does she deserve to cause mayhem on the charts for this album, or will it inflict chaos on her career?

To call this album a “pop” album would be an understatement. This album effortlessly flows between genres; some of what the media would call pop, but also rock and disco. It truly feels like a combination of all of her albums. She begins the album in this intensely electronic storm, hitting brutal darkness with the very echoey bass in the instrumentals of “Disease” and the vibrant low synth line in “Abracadabra.” The lyrics in this section are also menacing, with phrases like “Screamin’ for me baby / Like you’re gonna die / Poison on the inside, I could be your antidote tonight” (Disease) and “Like a poem said by a lady in red / You hear the last few words of your life” (Abracadabra) having very morbid undertones. The one song that doesn’t really go chronologically with the genres she shows in this album is “Garden Of Eden,” which has this fun, edgy pop vibe that she dove into in her third album ARTPOP. With tracks like “Donatella” and “Mary Jane Holland,” as well as this track, she has many snappy one-liners and eye-catching choruses. Other than Gaga herself, who would casually write, “I’ll take you to the Garden of Eden” in a pop song?

After a few tracks, the storm finally starts to fade. Beginning this section of the album is “Perfect Celebrity,” which has a similar darkness to “Disease.” The vocals seem to be lightening up, but she comes back with these final intense lyrical and sounding blows in the chorus and pre-chorus. She sings  “I’ve become a notorious being / Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling” in a mysterious and awkwardly high tone, like you’d find this song playing in some creepy abandoned house. At the chorus, she introduces a provoking drum melody and an insanely loud and high harmony line to make this song more of an edgier rock song. The lyricism is revealing on this song, showing Gaga’s perception of herself against her “clone,” or what the public sees of her. 

The opening of the next track, “Vanish Into You,” dives into a past relationship she’s had that she’s still reflecting on. It starts in these beautifully executed high notes with minimal instrumentals, but then quickly fades into a disco with very soft percussion and a beautiful balance between instrumental and vocals. The harmonies blend perfectly with her lead vocals, almost sounding like a symphony. The dominating line in the chorus, “Can I vanish into you?,” is such a creative lyric to show love but also to keep the dark energy from earlier in the album. The next song in this album, “Killah,” sounds as if “Monster Mash” and “We Will Rock You” had a music baby. The chorus is super cheesy in nature, especially with the repetitive lyrics and the pronunciation of the title of the song. Although it’s exactly what you’d expect when reading it, it’s funny to hear Gaga sing it. Although it’s more like a chant than a song in terms of vocal style, the instrumentals and silly lyrics still make it a fun listen.

The next song, “Zombieboy,” is arguably the most catchy. It opens with some chanting and clapping. Then, the instrumental comes in. It has a bouncy percussion line and some sparkly chimes in the background. Everything up to the pre-chorus is pretty groovy, especially due to the low bass guitar and the pacemaking drumline. The chorus is revitalizing to the song, echoing that same chant used in the intro with some groovy instrumental. The song has an insane pre-bridge, with a very light feeling electric guitar and some spliced up vocals to make it sound more techy. In the bridge, it starts off with only clapping and then slowly adds on more and more instrumental, a move that makes the bridge so much more revitalizing and more suspenseful. The track also has such good use of harmony, like in the bridge. The harmonious vocals balance perfectly with her regular vocals. It’s such an easy song to recall due to its intense instrumentals and perfectly executed production. After that comes a nod to the title of Born This Way’s “LoveGame,” a song called “LoveDrug.” The intro is enticing with Gaga quietly singing “Need your love, your lovedrug, your lovedrug” with some fun synth. The song is reminiscent of “Fun Tonight” from Gaga’s Chromatica album, but a bit more ramped up with the instrumentals. The chorus is hyped up with the synth, and the bridge has more intense electric guitar work similarly to “Zombieboy.” Sadly, right after the bridge, the song comes to a close. Another minute or two for this track would’ve made it perfect.

This “pop star” section of the album marks the start of the album’s downfall. Starting this new section with “How Bad Do U Want Me,” there’s some synth and not much drums. The vocals are monotone and not doing much to enhance the song. The song feels like a scrapped song from 1989 by Taylor Swift, and it’s pretty obvious why it would’ve been scrapped. It has similarly catchy, unserious lyrics and very bright instrumentals similar to “Is It Over Now” by Swift, but lacks that bright feel throughout the whole song and has less enthusiastic vocals. For having some great lyrics in the earlier part, hearing “Cause you like my hair, my ripped-up jeans / You like the bad girl I got in me” just seems like a big downgrade. The beginning of the next track, “Don’t Call Tonight,” seemed like it was going back to the good tracks. That wasn’t happening just yet. The instrumentals tried their best to seem as flashy as the ones earlier in the album, but they just didn’t compare. It was a good attempt at trying to get this album back on the rails, but it just wasn’t enough. 

The next song is truly the hero of the album, and it is called  “Shadow Of A Man.” The intro to this song was teased in a live performance on her 2022 tour for the album prior to this, titled the “Chromatica Ball.” It was the first true snippet of LG7, which would turn out to be MAYHEM. The chorus of the song is absolutely genius. It has some super quickly sung lyrics, and just like “Zombieboy,” references the intro of the track. The bridge has some more quick lyrics and the same synth that has been echoing throughout the song. Something about the lyric “Dancing in the shadow of a man” just feels so ominous, like it’d be said in a James Bond movie. 

After this vibrant pop hit, it’d be expected that that vibe would continue, but it didn’t. The next song, “The Beast,” was a slower song with very slow drums and synth that was meant to feel very mysterious. Instead of sounding mysterious, it came off as tired. The bridge was an extremely distorted electric guitar solo that just seems to make no sense in the song. It led into the last section of the album, which is the ballads. With an album that started off with such electric rock songs and high-energy pop songs with some groovy disco flair, the ballads feel like a last-minute thought. They’re both very beautiful sounding with deep piano and gorgeously executed vocals, but they just don’t have that same feel that the earlier parts of the album did that made it special. The song after “The Beast,” titled “Blade of Grass,” has an elegant blend of grand piano and acoustic guitar that works so well, along with some powerful vocals from Gaga. The closer of the album, “Die With A Smile” featuring Bruno Mars, had some distorted guitar with very clear sounding vocals from Gaga and Mars. These tracks had some of the best vocals, but lacked in instrumental usage, energy, and experimentation. For being such an experimental album, the closing of ballads felt safe. 

The first half had such high energy songs with vivid instrumentals and intense vocals, making it the better part of the album. After the huge surge of energy, the crash hit and quickly. Slowly moving ballads and basic pop songs seemed to lack due to the clear differences in experimentation from the first half. The album shouldn’t have to feel like the second half was meant to appeal to an average listener, it should all feel brand new. Sadly, it missed the mark there. Overall, the album is chaotic in parts and perfection in others. Isn’t that what mayhem truly means though?

My Personal Top Five

1st – Zombieboy

2nd – Perfect Celebrity

3rd – LoveDrug

4th – Vanish Into You

5th – Abracadabra

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