“Phantom of the dancefloor, come to me!” calls Lady Gaga on her single “Abracadabra”. And lo! The defiant freakazoid electropop spirit of her 2008 debut, The Fame, fills the sagging inflatable doll of the last decade’s safer musical choices and slumping sales. Huge big lungfuls of synth and guitar hooks reanimate her limbs. Dark, gnarly lyrics knowingly contort pop cliches into kinky PVC shapes. Nonsense syllables breathe into the beats, which throb on and on until Gaga is standing upright again in all her bleach-browed, platform-heel stomping glory. Bow down, little monsters! For her sixth studio album, Mayhem hails the return of your Mama Monster to all her shock-horror-bop glory.
Interviewed by Zane Lowe for Apple Music, the artist born Stefani Germanotta said this is an album on which she rejoices in her own “personal mayhem” and the defiant brand-disrupting choices she’s made in a “non-linear career”. With her wave-crasher of a voice, she flooded the full gamut of emotion into big band jazz standards with Tony Bennett, and won an Oscar for the middle-of-the-road country rock she made with Bradley Cooper in 2018. I’ve got a real soft spot for A Star is Born’s unashamedly melodramatic piano ballad, “Shallow”. But there’s no denying those recordings saw her working within genre convention. The sound she found on The Fame and returns to now on Mayhem, though, is all her own.
