Everything We Know About Lady Gaga’s Seventh Album ‘Mayhem’
After months of teasing, Lady Gaga is ready to reveal more information about her long-awaited seventh album. This will be the Grammy winner’s first LP since 2020’s Chromatica (though she released a standards-forward companion soundtrack to the film Joker: Folie à Deux titled Harlequin in the fall). Though she hasn’t given an exact release date yet, Gaga did tell Vogue in September that her new album will be out this February.
Gaga started hyping up LG7 just as the accidentally extended Chromatica era finally came to a close. At the end of her concert special Gaga Chromatica Ball, the screen flashed with the words “LG7. Gaga Returns.” She began offering up information on the new project as she promoted the film, which was recorded during her 2022 tour. And as she began promoting Joker, she gave even more details, leading up to the release of lead single “Disease.”
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On Jan. 27, a billboard in Times Square revealed that the album is called Mayhem and will be out on March 7th. Later, in a statement, she revealed that her third single and its accompanying music video would air during the Grammy Awards on February 2nd. “Abracadabra” arrived during a commercial break at the ceremony, revealing a music video that finds Gaga going back to her roots. “The category,” she says in the clip, “is dance or die.”
Here’s everything we’ve learned about Mayhem so far.
The new album is fueled by “the art of intensity”
During a Q&A following a screening of Gaga Chromatica Ball back in May 2024, the singer spoke a bit about her writing process for her new music. She was already deep into writing and recording her Chromatica follow-up at the time.
“I am in the studio every single day. I have written so many songs, I’ve been producing so many songs, and it’s nothing like anything that I’ve ever made before,” she said at the time. “I love to break genre, and I love to explore music. There’s something really beautiful about knowing that you will be loved no matter what you do.”
She pointed out that the tour itself inspired much of her new music. “Something I’m definitely exploring right now is sort of the art of intensity and I think that the art of intensity actually began during this tour,” she continued. “But I’m not done with it yet.”
Her fiancé Michael Polansky encouraged her to make a pop record
Gaga met businessman Polansky back in 2019, at Napster founder Sean Parker’s birthday party. They got engaged during COVID lockdowns, and he would end up going on tour with her in 2022. Gaga pointed out in Vogue last fall that she had been in a pretty dark place while working on Chromatica. Things are much different now, and it’s largely due to Polansky’s encouragement.
“Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record,” she revealed. “He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’ ” In the same interview, Polansky pointed out that seeing his fiancé perform on tour is what made him push for her to return to the studio. “On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her,” he explained. “I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”
“I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery,” Gaga continued. Polansky’s impact has been so big that he even gets a writing credit on lead single “Disease.”
The sound is a return to the “dark-pop” of The Fame Monster
Single “Disease” was a perfect introduction for fans into Gaga’s musical headspace at the moment. The heavy industrial song picked up lyrically where songs like “Bad Romance” and “The Cure” left off. “I can be your doctor/I can cure your disease,” she sings on the chorus.
In a November interview with Vogue about the song, she pointed out that her signature dark-pop sound will be an integral part of her new album.
“The album is chaotic from a genre perspective — it is genre-bending, and I think in that way is a deeply personal look into my mind as a producer and the way I think about music,” Gaga said. “When I write and produce and sing songs, I am always drawing upon my knowledge of the history of music, and so many artists and producers that came before me. In that way, this album is a celebration of a lot of the music that made me who I am, because when I returned to a darker pop style of pop, all my early experiences with music came out.”
The songs’ lyrics are mostly “fantasies”
“I wrote a lot of various fantasies and escapes,” Gaga told Vogue. “The only place reality is really present is that these fantasies are coming from a real person, trying to soothe their inner chaos. That’s where I found the reason for why I make this music. Each song is an exercise in personal chaos — a way to deal with myself.”
She made sure to point out, however, that it will still be fun. “The album is not extremely serious in that it’s very fun and meant to be enjoyed at a party, in a club, or at home having personal fun time — to be free of your worries at home or walking through life,” she said.
LG7 is nothing like Chromatica
In an interview with Rolling Stone about Harlequin, Gaga pointed out that her next pop album will be nothing like her last. “The pop album is nothing like Chromatica,” she said. She was reticent to divulge more at the time but gave a little taste of how personal it is: “What I would say is, it’s all for me. It’s meant to be ingested as a time in my life. And I’m also really excited about this idea that I don’t have to adhere to an era if I don’t want to. I can have a few going at once. That feels unhinged [laughs] and more like me or Harley. Or whoever.”
Number One single “Die With a Smile” will appear on Mayhem
Gaga’s duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile,” was originally released as a one-off collaboration for the pair. But she has since realized it was the “missing piece” of the album. “It’s a huge part of my album,” she told LA Times. “The record is full of my love of music — so many different genres, so many different styles, so many different dreams. It leaps around genre in a way that’s almost corrupt. And it ends with love.”
She continued, “That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find peace with love. Every song that I wrote, I just kept getting kind of swept away in these different dreams I was having about the past — almost like a recollection of all these bad decisions that I made in my life. But it ends in this very happy place.”
The Album Lyrics Are Dark and Cryptic
On Feb. 17, Gaga updated her official website to reveal a puzzle in which she his lyrics expected to appear on Mayhem. “Choke on the fame and hope it gets your high,” one reads, while another declares: “I’m the perfect celebrity.” The other one-liners that appear are intense and gritty, like “Yeah your girlfriend isn’t here,” “I’ll burn a hole right through your eyes,” “You can’t hear her with the music on,” and “Tap on my vein suck on my blood diamond.” The lyrics appear when a cursor is held down on the screen and moved through the cluster of randomized letters. They appear one at a time — revealing quotes including “Goodbye I’ll see you in my dreams,” “Have been so worried that I’m lost,” and “DJ hit the lights” — but quickly disappear.
She was inspired by the ‘joy’ of ballroom culture
In an interview with InStyle, Gaga pointed out how important the ballroom scene was to the making of Mayhem. “I grew up in New York City and I also was a student of Paris Is Burning when I was really, really young,” she said. “And I was always inspired by the tremendous amount of grace, freedom, expression and joy of ballroom culture,” she said. I was lucky enough to be around some dancers that were a part of that life.” She continued by celebrating the “privilege” of being included in the wider dance community.
“There are these spaces in the world where there’s an ability for the community to express and experience joy, even when life is not treating them that way,” she explained. “And I am still so inspired by it and to this day, it felt like a relevant thing to bring up in the [“Abracadabra”] video because it’s about resilience. I can’t think of a place where I’ve seen more resilience than in a ballroom.”
Producer Andrew Watt called her “fearless” in the studio
Gaga worked with Andrew Watt on single “Abracadabra” and he sang her praises during an interview with Howard Stern. “You should see when she steps up to a microphone, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen and any artist I’ve ever worked with,” he said. “She is going for it, giving her all the point where she has to stop sometimes. She has to stop ’cause she’s giving so much of herself, like her body is shaking as she’s singing. It’s amazing.”
As for “Abracadabra,” Watt described the type of vision Gaga turned into a reality when she wrote the song. “As she’s making the song, sometimes you’re speaking to her and she’s not there because she sees like the whole picture, she sees everything,” he explained. “This song kind of ended up becoming about like a night out and someone casting a spell on you, and she decided that she wanted that part of the song to be the spell that was being cast.”
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