Lady Gaga Teases ‘Mayhem’ With Cryptic Lines: ‘Choke on the Fame and Hope It Gets You High’
There are tiny black letters floating against an intense orange backdrop on Lady Gaga’s official website — and fans think they’re a hidden strings of lyric for them to find ahead of Mayhem, her forthcoming studio album scheduled for release on March 7.
The lyrics show up if you hold down a cursor on the screen and move it through the cluster of randomized letters. They appear one at a time, but quickly disappear back into the website. “Choke on the fame and hope it gets your high,” one reads, while another declares: “I’m the perfect celebrity.” Gaga hints at the grit of Mayhem with one-liners 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.”
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Gaga has previewed Mayhem with the singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” which arrived in the middle of the 2025 Grammy Awards. “Abracadabra,” with all of its tripped out, bizarro Gaga imagery, immediately ramped up excitement around the release. The record has been used in more than 195,000 TikTok posts, many of which find fans replicating the glitching choreography from its accompanying music video.
“The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” Gaga recently shared in a statement. She described the return-to-form creative process as “reassembling a shattered mirror: even if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something beautiful and whole in its own new way.”
The imagery of the shattered mirror appears on the Mayhem album cover, in addition to being thematically referenced in the scattered letters that revealed additional lines, like “Goodbye I’ll see you in my dreams,” “Have been so worried that I’m lost,” and “DJ hit the lights.”
Mayhem will mark Gaga’s first full-length LP since 2020’s Chromatica. She first previewed Mayhem in October 2024 with “Disease.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, she described the creative process: “It felt like a way into the chaos of the album, which is kind of exercises in chaos — different sides of who I am as a person. To me, there’s some kind of chaos in all of the ways we try to analyze ourselves.”
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