Lady Gaga at the 2025 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Photo / Getty Images
Lady Gaga at the 2025 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Photo / Getty Images
Review by Chris Richards
Chris Richards has been The Washington Post's pop music critic since 2009. Before joining The Post, he freelanced for various music publications.
The Grammy winner’s new album Mayhem channels the singer’s absurd glory years, writes Washington Post’s Chris Richards. It hits differently in absurd times.
The idea of big fun suggests the existence of little fun, and Lady Gaga is now the kind of pop star who cando both. Just Dance. Meat dress. Being carried down the red carpet at the Grammys inside an egg. Appearing on her album cover as a mutated motorcycle. Naming said album Born This Way. That’s big fun through and through, the very stuff that made Gaga into a household name more than a decade ago. Now, on her first proper studio album in nearly five years, it’s time for some little fun – a little disco, a little balladry; all in all, a little better than anyone expected.
To be clear, little fun still counts as fun. It’s easily had and fondly remembered, always amounting to a net positive in this brutal thing called existence. Big fun, on the other hand, requires latent effort. In pop music, it involves risk-taking, surprise-springing and a certain fearlessness toward appearing tacky – all things that Lady Gaga mastered at the apex of her relevance back in 2011, reaching the top of the charts by singing about self-acceptance at the top of her lungs.
Mayhem vinyl (2 LP set) by Lady Gaga.
But on this new album, Mayhem, instead of trying to generate big fun anew, she’s chosen to revisit that indelible iteration of self, and the results feel smaller. Her new dance floor dramas sound modest and efficient, and whenever the endorphin rush of melodies make it tempting to call Mayhem a return to form, we simply can’t. That form used to be larger than life. Then, life got so much larger. Good luck trying to form a mental tally of the changes that our blinkered society has gone through since this woman was strutting through the zeitgeist, clad in raw beef. In 2025, Lady Gaga knows the world has become more absurd than her.
As a singer, at least, she might sound better than ever – the result of a decade-plus toiling in various showbiz trenches. Remember how she made those jazz albums with the late Tony Bennett? And all those years she spent in that Las Vegas residency? And how she’s acted in massive Hollywood productions that the world has deemed good (A Star is Born), bad (House of Gucci) and ugly (Joker: Folie a Deux)? Regardless of how you divvy up her wins and losses, the totality of these experiences have seemingly made Gaga into a far more sensitive pop singer. In her big fun years, she sang way out ahead of the beat, as if incapable of waiting for the next moment of life to arrive. Now, instead of barging into every syllable, her phrasing sounds more patient, more purposeful, which ultimately makes her Gwen-Stefani-channeling-Tina-Turner thing a lot easier to love.
Lady Gaga in 'Joker: Folie a Deux' with Joaquin Phoenix. Photo / Niko Tavernise, Warner Bros
Her sensitivity is a flexibility, too, and on Mayhem, it allows her to flourish in four basic modes: zesty disco Gaga, mid-tempo ’80s Gaga, forlorn balladeer Gaga and original recipe. When she’s in her disco zone, on the slinky Zombieboy, she operates in breezy sighs and kitschy tut-tuts. In 80s mode, on LoveDrug and Don’t Call Tonight, her voice only threatens to curdle. And on the album’s slow closers, Blade of Grass and the tacked-on Bruno Mars duet Die With a Smile, she sounds more in control than ever. Gaga has always been obsessed with that kind of studied, slow-moving expertise, but let’s not encourage her because she definitely sounds most alert in her factory settings, especially during the tongue-twisted hook of Abracadabra, reworking the rah-rah-ooh-la-la of Bad Romance with a triumphant wink.
Lady Gaga released a clip from Abracadabra, the second single from Mayhem, during the 2025 Grammy broadcast. Photo / @ladygaga
If Mayhem offers four distinct musical Gagas, the lyrics suggest two. Duality is the album’s main theme - big fun trying to erupt out of little fun, perhaps. “You like the bad girl I got in me,” Gaga sings on How Bad Do U Want Me, a Taylor Swift-shaped song that Swift couldn’t get away with. Later, over the saucy surge of The Beast, Gaga serenades her werewolf lover in the second person: “You can’t hide who you are … I know you’re hungry, ready to bite.” Maybe Mayhem is supposed to be the mystery elixir that turns an audience of Dr Jeckylls back into her little monsters again. Is it working? Are we having fun here? A little.
