When was DWAS added to Mayhem?

[Ziggy 14,242]

Definitely after it was a hit especially considering how long it took to come out. From my recollection, there was some interview about how long it took to release and my guess is they dropped it to correspond w joker and harlequin but as a one off. She would have called it a lead or mentioned the album at all if it was some integral part to it at the outset. My feeling is that it doesn’t ultimately matter that much since it’s not like mayhem sucks without it (quite the contrary lol), but they definitely were not expecting the barnstorming success it had and I think that says less about mayhem and more about DWAS. Mayhem’s era has nothing to do with and would have been fine without it, but they clearly were not thinking this song would do what it did (some success but not like this) and so pivoted slightly to give it a home and to not overshadow mayhem. If you say it’s a part of it then it all looks cohesive but if you have a mammoth standalone and an album that did much less it looks weird and uncertain. So it always seemed not sooo much about number fluffing and more about strategic cohesion for her work over that year

[andy232000 13,231]

5 hours ago, PartySick said:

Yeah, albums usually get pressed about 3 months before release.

Mayhem was dropped in March, 3 months out is January/December which is two months after Disease was dropped as Mayhem's lead and four months after DWAS came out and exploded.

Metadata can be changed too. I've got multitracks from a bunch of songs and artists where the dates are post-release  

Though I'm not sure what DWAS being mastered in July says either way? That's a month before it was released, three months before Disease dropped, five months before Mayhem would have been pressed, and eight months before Mayhem came out which...totally lines up with the theory that DWAS was a last minute addition  

Unless someone knows exactly when Mayhem was pressed ('cause albums are sometimes pressed as early as 6 months before release) but that information was never made public.

We can literally only speculate and argue

In Gaga’s defense, the decision to add DWAS must have been made well prior before it became a huge hit. The song only peaked at #1 in January and as many users have noted, the album must have been sent to pressing in late 2024, probably November or before. It means Gaga or her team were able to anticipate the growth of DWAS would be huge and decided to preventively add it. At least there’s strategy there and it wasn’t a full on post success slap on. They had some inkling of foresight and I tbh respect that. 

[Chromanne 2,688]

From what I've read in this thread, when Gaga was still working on MAYHEM, she had already decided Disease as the first single, then Bruno approached her and they both finish the song. The song releases on August 2024. It could be possible that Gaga decided to add DWAS in MAYHEM at least before September 2024 if she's releasing the album in March 2025 because DWAS was included in vinyls and it takes at least 6 months to press the vinyls. Maybe Gaga decided this in July or maybe it could have also been in September, no later than that, keeping in mind that DWAS peaked at #2 in November 2024 and peaked at #1 only by January 2025.

[SevenWonder 4,768]

I couldn't care less when it was added. I'm just glad it was. 

Mayhem will end up selling 12-13 million copies in no small part because of DWAS and the album deserves every ounce of commercial success it achieves. 

Does it totally fit? No. But who cares? Just skip it if it bothers you. 

[River 128,483]

4 hours ago, Controversiaga said:

But where are the facts??? We still have none.

I asked ChatGPT also:

 

Yes — it is absolutely possible that “Die With a Smile” was added to MAYHEM after the song was released on August 16, 2024. In fact, after looking more closely at the manufacturing window, I would not use the March 2025 vinyl as evidence that Gaga had already decided to include DWAS before August 16.

The dates leave a lot more time than you might think.

The window was almost 7 months

DWAS was released August 16, 2024. MAYHEM was released March 7, 2025.

That’s about 203 days — 6 months and 19 days.

A vinyl record does not normally need to be submitted seven months before release. The manufacturing process involves final audio/mastering → lacquer cutting → plating → test pressing/approval → mass pressing → printing/assembly → shipping/distribution. Even allowing a fairly conservative several-month production window for a huge major-label release, there was ample time for Interscope to lock the album master sometime in the fall of 2024 and still have hundreds of thousands of records distributed for March.

And we have a particularly useful comparison: DWAS itself.

It wasn’t released until August 16, yet Interscope subsequently manufactured a physical 7-inch vinyl single, which was commercially released in the U.S. in October 2024.

So physical vinyl production was demonstrably happening for DWAS after its August release.

What the MAYHEM vinyl actually proves

The standard MAYHEM vinyl was pressed by GZ Media under job 294489E, with the lacquer cut at Sterling Sound. DWAS is physically C4, the final song on Side C.

Gaga’s official store confirms the same sequence, and multiple launch variants contain DWAS.

That proves:

DWAS had been added to MAYHEM before the album’s vinyl manufacturing was finalized.

It doesn’t prove:

DWAS was part of MAYHEM before August 16, 2024.

That’s an important distinction.

Could this timeline realistically have happened?

Very much so. Consider a hypothetical timeline:

August 16, 2024
DWAS comes out as a standalone single.

↓ 1–2 months pass

September/October 2024
The song becomes an obvious success. Gaga/Interscope decide it belongs on LG7.

↓

October/November 2024
MAYHEM track sequence and vinyl master are finalized. Sterling cuts the lacquers.

↓

November/December 2024
Plating/test pressings/pressing begins.

↓

December 2024–February 2025
Large-scale manufacturing, packaging and worldwide distribution.

↓

March 7, 2025
MAYHEM arrives in stores.

There is nothing technically implausible about that timeline.

And they wouldn’t necessarily need to wait until every other aspect of the album was completed before preparing things. Artwork, packaging design, manufacturing arrangements, retailer orders, etc. can overlap with audio preparation.

There’s another clue I find pretty compelling

DWAS wasn’t merely released in August and immediately declared part of Gaga’s album.

It continued to have its own standalone physical campaign. The 7-inch single wasn’t released in the U.S. until October 2024.

Then when MAYHEM eventually appeared, DWAS is unusually positioned as the very last track — C4 — after what otherwise feels like the album’s concluding sequence. On the standard vinyl, Side D isn’t music at all; it’s an etching.

That doesn’t prove it was appended later, but it’s entirely compatible with that scenario.

So I’d revise my earlier conclusion

I was too aggressive when I suggested that the vinyl probably meant the decision happened in late 2024/and potentially implied it had to have been planned very early.

We can confidently establish this:

August 16, 2024 — DWAS released
⬇️
~6.7-month manufacturing window
⬇️
March 7, 2025 — MAYHEM vinyl released with DWAS

There is more than enough time within that window to add DWAS after its release and manufacture the original MAYHEM vinyl accordingly.

So if Gaga and Bruno said around August 2024 that DWAS wasn’t intended for either of their albums, the existence of DWAS on the March 2025 MAYHEM vinyl doesn’t contradict that statement. They could have been telling the complete truth in August, watched the song explode, and Gaga/Interscope could subsequently have decided in September, October, or potentially even November to add it to MAYHEM.

What I’d really like to nail down now is GZ job #294489E. If we can date neighboring GZ jobs (294488E, 294490E, etc.) to their lacquer/plating/manufacturing dates, we may be able to estimate the month when the MAYHEM master actually reached GZ. That would get us much closer to answering when DWAS was added rather than merely establishing that post-August was possible.

sis CGPT is writing what u want to hear, it's like that friend that always nods and tells u "you're right babe"

[Ivy 13,791]

I think after but not long after. They probably saw positive reception and decided to add

[River 128,483]

4 hours ago, Controversiaga said:

You still did not provide ANY receipts for the things you claim to be facts

I'm still right and now it's your job to dismiss my claims, which you couldn't do without CGPT your bff, so that's it, I won this argument, u lost 

[Purrrrrr 18,359]

idg the obsession over DWAS being on Mayhem and the 'what would Mayhem streams be without DWAS' stuff  

it's on and is part of Mayhem kids, get over it

[LGAte 1,082]

8 hours ago, Controversiaga said:

Thank you !!

yeah it was def a cop out but also it was the smart thing to do , to ensure a successful album. Because look at mayhem otherwise 

Mayhem still has pretty solid streams, without it? 
 

having 2.5 billion streams on an album in its first year is not a flop. Thats the same as Beyoncé’s Renaissance and no one calls that album a flop. And Abracadabra was a cultural hit. lol. 

[nATAH 57,745]

why are people still posting theories when somebody here has just said we found out the song was added before it was a hit?

[RochesterJoannster 4,170]

I always thought it was added once it became a hit, but the album wasn’t exactly finished anyway and it’s already a bit of a catch-all genres album. Mayhem was definitely easier of an album to add DWAS to sonically. The ballad section is rounded out thanks to its inclusion. 
 

It would have been much less forgivable if she tried to tackily slap it onto Chromatica or ARTPOP.

[Bronco 27,303]

The easiest way to answer this is by looking at what was said about DWAS being on Mayhem. 

It was around mid-October to mid-November when the PR pieces for her stopped saying it was a standalone duet and started saying it would be on Mayhem. 
Which also puts it at around the 5-6 month mark prior to the album release which ties in with production timescales (its usally 3 these days but this was the holiday period so assume extra grace time). 

And they didn't really push Disease. 
We speculated a lot that it was due to the JFAD backlash, which is definitely a possibility. But equally, DWAS was an organic and self sustaining global smash hit by that point so the standard PR tactic has always been to not canibalise your momentum. 
We probably only got Disease because they'd already committed to releasing an October lead single. 

[gagzus 24,624]

We don’t really know because before Disease even came out based on the leaked multitracks metadata it showed most of the album was mastered not long after DWAS was released but before it became a hit. Based on Gaga’s track record of how her album track lists change though it could possibly have been added before they sent the final album off to press.

I mean for BTW they had a track list and a mastered standard edition prepared by the time she shot the second album cover (the original shoot happened earlier in 2010 and has never leaked). A lot of the final tracks from even the standard version weren’t on that version, some had different names (like HURTL being simply called Road to Love) and some of the deluxe tracks like Black Jesus (called Amen Fashion) were on that track list. 

Edited 7 hours ago by gagzus

[Starmie25 22,775]

I still believe it was originally for Joker 

[gagzus 24,624]

8 minutes ago, Starmie25 said:

I still believe it was originally for Joker 

Both Gaga and Bruno confirmed they made it in 2024 whilst she was working on Mayhem, Joker had finished production by the end of 2023. 

Edited 7 hours ago by gagzus