https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/best-albums/the-40-best-albums-of-2025-so-far
When Lady Gaga says that Mayhem is a “pop album,” she’s using that description loosely. It’s not a sibling of The Fame, or Born This Way, or Chromatica—even though all of those titles have mothered Mayhem into existence. Gaga, who is knocking on the doorstep of 40, has finally drawn from her greatest wellspring of inspiration, be it the chaos of counterculture punk, the panging, crushing metallic walls of Nine Inch Nails, Prince’s output with the New Power Generation or, unequivocally, David Bowie’s discography, namely Fame. She returns to the spaces of Chromatica, pulling from boogie and French house; she restores the sleazy, crooked divinity of The Fame with a potent dose of sex, power and resistance. “Vanish Into You” is her best song since “Judas”; “Zombieboy” welds a stupefying, Chic-like, four-on-the-floor rhythm with a head-splitting, angular guitar stroke; “How Bad Do U Want Me” summons the synths of Vince Clarke; power-balladry lights a fire within “Blade of Grass”; “Garden of Eden” soothes Gaga’s pleasured, bad-romantic soul after her slow-dance with sinners on “Disease”; the fist-pumping “Perfect Celebrity” calls back to her 2009 VMAs performance, where she bled from her stomach while singing “Paparazzi”—leaving a lot of people asking the same question then that I have now, as I listen to Mayhem front-to-back: How the hell did she pull this off? This is some of the most joy Gaga has felt making music, all but confirmed not just by her tone of voice when speaking to me about Mayhem, but in “Vanish Into You”‘s emphatic, “We were happy just to be alive” chorus. And it’s going to make a lot of her longtime fans happy too. Just like how her unpredictable outfits during the awards show cycle of 2010/2011 kept everyone guessing, the songs of Mayhem are just as capricious, strange and rewarding. —Matt Mitchell