Lady Gaga on ’Mayhem,’ Gesaffelstein & finding her confidence

“I think relating to myself as a celebrity is not something that resonates with me very much,” Lady Gaga says midway through our interview about her seventh studio album Mayhem. The statement is apparent enough when I call and she pops into the Zoom frame barefaced and with her blonde hair neatly plaited in two braids, snuggled up on a couch — no black, sunglasses, or out-there accessories in sight. She introduces herself to me as Stefani (as if I didn’t already know), quipping at the fact that we share the same name. “I’m a Stefani too, so we’re both Stefanis.”

It may be a surprise to hear this considering how much has been made about how Mayhem is her most “Lady Gaga” record in years. The sound of The Fame Monster and Born This Way, that high-concept, dark electro-pop which vaulted her into global stardom and coalesced the first layer of the Lady Gaga identity, is all over this new album. Call it a return-to-her-roots effort as it oozes theatricality and camp, goes big on stadium-sized instrumentation, and in “Die With A Smile,” sees her reigning in the top 40 once again. Gaga from the 2010s is back like no time has passed at all — though, of course, it has. “I’ve always been in charge of my music, but I would definitely say that I’m more the boss in my life now than I ever have been,” she tells The FADER. “And it took me a long time to get here.”

It’s the circumstances of how the record came together that set the foundation for Gaga’s triumphant return and her best album in years. Recorded over 2023 and 2024 in Malibu, California, at Rick Rubin’s legendary Shangri-La Studios, where she also made 2016’s Joanne and parts of 2013’s Artpop, she assembled a tight team consisting of executive producer Andrew Watt, French electronic producer Gesaffelstein, Canadian hitmaker Cirkut, and her fiancé (executive producer and occasional co-writer) Michael Polansky. Unlike with making 2020’s Chromatica, a project where she says she “second guessed myself a lot,” she walked into MAYHEM with a clear vision; she knew how she wanted the guitar to sound, the bass, the synths, and creating came quickly. The small team meant she had to steer the ship: “It was important to work with people that were going to collaborate well with me.”

The group’s chemistry is evident in the music, which whips from dark techno and industrial funk to disco, grunge rock, campy horror-pop, and grand, eye-watering balladry — while still harnessing the soul of Gaga. There’s dashes of Prince in the bright, tinny guitars that blaze through songs like “Killah” and “LoveDrug,” ABBA in the neon-lit auras of “Vanish Into You” and “Don’t Call Tonight,” and hyperpop in “How Bad Do You Want Me,” the album’s poppiest song with a transcendent, Swiftian bridge. It’s the sound of Mayhem that embodies its ethos: glorious chaos that shatters the Gaga mirror but glues it back together again so the refractions radiate brighter in all directions. Nothing is subtle and everything is heightened, including her own storytelling as she belts about heartbreak, yearning, and wanting to unleash “the beast inside” on the wonderfully campy karaoke belter “The Beast.”

Gaga credits her newfound confidence for the unbridled nature of the record. She points to the Gesaffelstein-produced “Killah,” a down-and-dirty funk explosion and the record’s standout, as an example of how centered and reinvigorated she felt while making Mayhem: “I don’t know if I’ve ever sounded that confident on a song before. It’s just peak confidence and I’m somebody that needs to fantasize about confidence to have it. ” Their collaboration is one that’s over a decade in the making after she tried to get him for Artpop but things didn’t work out. “He’s amazing. He’s super interesting. He has a very interesting way of working,” she adds. At a recent press event, she recounted how it was because of him that “Blade of Grass,” the album’s classically-sounding ballad, turned out the way it did and not like another hyper-Gaga track. “He sort of looked at me like, ‘Can we just do something original?’” she said.

Multiple times in our conversation Gaga vaguely references a dark time in her life prior to Mayhem, a period when she wasn’t “feeling well” and was “not in a good place,” and in previous interviews for the album she’s also mentioned battling a “darkness” and “inner demons.” Gaga said she was able to come to terms with all these sides of herself by practicing “radical acceptance,” a process that involves embracing the negatives and positives of her life, knowing that they’re ultimately sewn together to create one complicated human experience.

The fissure in her careful welding can be seen most clearly on “Perfect Celebrity,” an angry anthem that excoriates her cult of personality. “You make me money / I make you laugh,” she belts, sharply summarizing the transactional nature of the most public-facing part of her life. Gaga’s sung about fame before on songs like “Paparazzi” but she says she doesn’t think she’s ever “written about it the way I did on that song. That song has a particular venom.” She calls it “very angry,” but also haunting, and… kinda funny? After some consideration, Gaga concludes it’s ultimately more an indictment of her own feelings: “It’s almost like saying, I don’t really know why. I don’t even really know why I did this, or why I’m this angry, I just am.”

There’s that complicated nature of herself again, the turmoil and euphoria, a whiplash that defines Mayhem and this new iteration of Gaga. Two decades into her career, she says she finally feels some looseness in her longtime persona, where Gaga is not just a celebrity or a “creation to step into” but something that can hold all parts of her — the parts that want to make films, write scores, continue making “her poetry,” and soon, hopefully, start a family. “That’s the whole me and what I really want to do,” she says, “is be a whole person.”