Lady Gaga’s Mayhem arrives against an unusual backdrop of success and failure. Her turn in Joker: Folie à Deux is responsible for the latter, a Hollywood flop for the ages. Gaga’s spin-off album of jazz standards, Harlequin, was collateral damage: it scraped into the US top 20. Yet 2024 also brought one of her biggest hits, the Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile”. Mayhem’s other advance singles, “Disease” and “Abracadabra”, have been received warmly too.
“Go with the chaos” was the singer’s mantra while making it. The opening songs revive memories of her best album, 2011’s Born This Way. “Disease” finds the singer sternly ministering to a suffering admirer amid thwacking electronic basslines and stentorian disco-in-a-dungeon chants. “Abracadabra” is an inspired piece of hi-NRG sorcery. “Garden of Eden” has Gaga “falling over in my nine-inch heels” as she tries eccentrically — brilliantly — to reverse the fall of mankind with a paradisiacal hook-up on the dancefloor.
“Perfect Celebrity” is the worldly foil to one of her first hits, 2009’s “Paparazzi”. Whereas before Gaga took the part of the camera-wielding soul-snatcher, stalking the object of her desire, now she is the commodified creation of fame, a “human doll” who inspires love and hatred. The scenario is more earnest than “Paparazzi”, although the music gives it a spirited electropop spark.
But then the album loses its way. As if tiring of the campy routines of her early years, Gaga turns her attention to other modes. For “Vanish into You”, she belts out rote expressions of passion (“We were happy just to be alive”), as though trying to sing her way out of a Coldplay anthem. “Zombieboy” is an expertly observed but flat recreation of a 1980s New York milieu of disco, electro and hip-hop. “Shadow of a Man” imitates Thriller-era Michael Jackson: an impressive act of mimicry, but with scant purpose beyond that.
Gaga’s vocal versatility and sense of playfulness dispose her to pastiche. The way she sings “I want to feel the beast inside” in power-ballad “The Beast”, growling and swooping and soaring her way through the schlocky erotic-thriller phrase, is a treat. So is “Killah”, a Prince tribute spliced with her signature electronic pop. But she falls victim to her facility.
The album’s initial engagement with her old work hits home in a way that her ability to copy Jackson’s yelps does not. The songs’ stories get thinner while the music loses character. “Die with a Smile”, her toothy pop-soul duet with Mars, king of pop pastiche, is the closing track, but its showbizzy spirit seems to spread through the tracks preceding it. They are meticulously arranged and well performed — but also routinised, risk-averse and not at all chaotic.
★★☆☆☆
Released by Interscope Records