Lady Gaga: Mayhem review – a fabulous return to her freaky first principles

(Interscope)
After some noteworthy musical and cinematic misfires, Gaga gets back to her core themes of sex, sleaze and celebrity on an album that sounds not retro, but relevant

Lady Gaga’s single Abracadabra is enjoying its fifth consecutive week in the UK Top 10. You can imagine a collective sigh of relief chez Gaga: she has been experiencing what you might call a case of career sea sickness, in which unadulterated commercial triumphs have been followed by very public flops. In the credit column, there’s Die With a Smile, a power-ballad duet with Bruno Mars that went to No 1 in 28 countries and spent 10 weeks as the world’s biggest-selling single. (Released last August, it also appears on Mayhem.) In the debit, there was her starring role in the disastrous Joker: Folie à Deux, a film that was estimated to have lost Warner Brothers something in the region of $150m (£116m), and which seemed to take both the Gaga-heavy soundtrack and her own, jazz-based “companion album” Harlequin down with it. You might have expected the legions of Little Monsters (as her fans are known) to rally around the latter, but apparently not. Outside of a couple of remix collections, it was the lowest-selling Lady Gaga album to date and her second jazz album to noticeably underperform: a follow-up collection of duets with the late Tony Bennett, 2021’s Love for Sale, failed to replicate the success of its predecessor, Cheek to Cheek.

One theory is that Gaga’s eclecticism might have succeeded in confusing people. The fact that you never quite know what she’s going to throw out next – electronic dance-pop, soft rock, jazz, country, AOR – should be cause for celebration, but perhaps it has proved a bit much in a world dominated by streaming’s overload, where artists are advised to maintain a clear brand lest they get lost amid the sheer torrent of new music. Maybe what was needed was a bold restatement of Gaga’s original core values. That was precisely what Abracadabra, and indeed its predecessor, Disease, provided: big dirty synths; big noisy choruses; high-camp, fashion-forward videos and, in the case of Abracadabra, a hook apparently designed to remind listeners of the word-mangling intro to 2009’s Bad Romance.

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