This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
An enjoyable detail around the release of Lady Gaga’s new album, Mayhem, was people trying to work out just how many albums she’s made. Gaga trailed it last year as “LG7” — that is, her seventh album.
But when fans such as Justin Curto (a writer at New York Magazine) started to tally her discography, with its tangle of re-releases, they quickly found that “the Lady Gaga math does not add up”.
If you only counted solo studio albums, Mayhem was actually LG6. Including her two collaborations with Tony Bennett pushed the number higher — but too high, making Mayhem LG8. And if you counted soundtracks, remix albums and expanded versions, the number quickly spiralled out of control. LG10? LG15? The normal rules of arithmetic could not help you here.
The real answer, anyway, is that Mayhem is actually LG2, and the only other Lady Gaga album is The Fame Monster, the enlarged 2009 version of her 2008 debut The Fame that includes the gargantuan single “Telephone” (a song that I can’t not dance to even now). If that sounds unduly dismissive of the intervening 16 years of Gaga’s career, well — this is the “critics” section, not the “being nice about people” section.
It’s not that Gaga (real name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) has been bad, exactly, during that period. If you set aside her Super Mario Bros accent in the spectacularly camp Ridley Scott movie House of Gucci, and her appearance in the dismal Joker: Folie à Deux, then Gaga has been on a solid artistic streak ever since her breakout. But until now, she’s never been as much fun as she was at the tail end of the noughties.
Gaga arrived in 2008 with an imperial run of Europop-inspired singles that leaned hard on the celebrity culture of the time. Britney Spears had just had her breakdown, Paris Hilton had recently served a prison sentence for a traffic violation and Lindsay Lohan was in between rehab stints. The media adored a trainwreck, and Gaga performed the role perfectly in her music.
In the lyrics of her debut, “Just Dance”, she’s the archetypal hot mess: so drunk she “can’t see straight”, wondering “how’d I turn my shirt inside out?”. “Poker Face” takes the single entendre of the title and thrusts it relentlessly into your ears — like Madonna crying “I’m down on my knees” in “Like a Prayer”, with the subtlety appropriate to a post-PornHub world.
But her most exciting single from this period was “Paparazzi”, which turns the image of the celebrity-stalking photographer into a wistful, twisted love song. “I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me,” she sings, and the song could be addressed either to a man or to the abstract concept of fame. Gaga’s entire persona revolved around the idea of wanting it, and “it” could be either sex or stardom.
The character was exaggerated, but there was a fundamental truth to it: Germanotta was determined to win the world’s attention, and, as Gaga, she was doing it — with the help of avant-garde hats, improbable shoes and (on one occasion) a dress made of meat, which all made her irresistible to photographers.
But she also wanted to be taken seriously. After all, Gaga really can sing: the use of autotune on her early songs is a style choice rather than, as it was for some of her peers, a necessity. The Bennett duets were a way of announcing that she wasn’t just the peroxide blonde cartoon she played on stage.
They were also a way back from the excess of the Gaga character, as the hypersexed aesthetic of the era began to sour. Gaga’s nadir was probably the song “Do What U Want” on her 2013 album Art Pop — a collaboration with (then plausibly accused, now convicted) sex criminal R Kelly that one label insider described as an “ad for rape”. Gaga pulled the song from streaming in 2019.
The seamy side of pop culture that Gaga had mined for content had gone from edgy to alarming by the 2020s, and, though she still turned out bangers, nothing had the joyful mischief of that first run of songs. This is what Mayhem brings back: the sweaty, sleazy ecstasy of the late-2000s. Gaga is nearly 40 now and happily in a relationship, but she can still act the messed-up scenester to perfection.
So Mayhem has the disco strut of “Zombieboy”, which sounds like a pack of marauding cheerleaders pursuing Chic’s Nile Rodgers (it isn’t Rodgers on the track, but I had to double check), with Gaga declaring her intention to get the Zombieboy’s “paws all over me”. It’s great and a direct call-back to “Monster” on The Fame Monster.
The other big stand-out on a very strong album is the ballad-y “How Bad Do U Want Me”, which is almost in Taylor Swift territory — but with the trademark Gaga sexual drama. The title is really asking two conflicting questions of her coupled-up lover: how much does he want her to play the bad girl, but also how much is he willing to lose to be with her?
Pop culture’s great correction was needed: it’s grotesque that a predator such as Kelly could operate in the industry for so long. But pop music, like all art, needs licence to play at the edges of the dark and dangerous.
It feels good to welcome Gaga back to where she’s always been best: in the glitter-scattered dirt.
