Lady Gaga has had the world at her fingertips for over a decade. Her trail-blazing MO has been to make constant amendments to her sound and style, to head off any attempt by critics to shove her in a box. Her sound has ranged from dance-pop and electro-funk to country and folk-inflected rock.

The 38-year-old New Yorker, also known as Stefani Germanotta, has seemed imperious for so long, it’s hard to recall the shock to the system she gave us in those early days. The incendiary landing of her debut single ‘Just Dance’, in April 2008, exploded the pop landscape in a salvo of glitter, hairspray and, rather triumphantly, dance music. It became clear that the genre was about to become a lot more interesting.

The track, and her subsequent debut album The Fame (2008), brought us handshake-to-handshake with the Gaga many of us know and love – that is, a budding superstar who donned a dress made of bloodied flank steak and death-defying heels to match. With The Fame, Lady Gaga suddenly dominated the airwaves with hits like ‘Poker Face’ (the world’s biggest selling single of 2009), ‘Bad Romance’, ‘Alejandro’ (on the De Luxe version, The Fame Monster), and a flurry of others. The album still ranks as the 10th biggest-selling of the 21st Century in the Billboard US charts.

Then came the sophomore follow-up, which shifted from the raw sexual edge of The Fame towards social critique. The songs on Born This Way (2011) addressed key roadblocks to equality for women and queer people, including organised religion, sexual puritanism and cis-het feminine ideals, in the 21st-century language of EDM beats and meme-able imagery.

The impact was immense. While some governments and religious orders went as far as banning the album, others celebrated its obvious cultural importance. On the 10th anniversary of its release, the City of West Hollywood declared May 23 “Born This Way” day, with lawmakers giving Gaga a key to the city.

The title track became an official queer anthem. In December 2022, after US President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law at the White House, ‘Born This Way’ started playing immediately as planned. It was a genuinely historic moment.

Lady Gaga’s third album, Artpop (2013), genuflected at the altar of underground electronic music alongside Sun Ra and Greco-Roman mythology.

The response was lukewarm, but the album has endured in electronic circles, and become an underrated favourite among fans – affectionately called Little Monsters. The jazz-informed influences, meanwhile, gave a sneak peek into har next incarnation as a big-band starlet.

In 2014, she enlisted her friend Tony Bennett to collaborate on the jazz-standard album Cheek To Cheek (2014), which topped the charts and introduced Bennett to a new generation of listeners.

New Image

The tide shifted. The ambivalent reception given to Artpop, controversies surrounding it and Born This Way, and a build-up of negative press suggested the need for a new direction.

She returned to the spotlight with a more personal look that shocked her loyal fans. Her sound on Joanne (2016), with its soft-rock backing, also seemed to be packaged for more general consumption. The cover seems more a reflection of Germanotta than Gaga, with the star’s side-profile softened by the curve of a pink cowboy hat against an unadorned wall.

Where Lady Gaga once appeared as a high-wire act, Joanne showed a more earth-bound side of the artist. Some called it a wholesale transition, but it may have been far more organic than that, an artist simply being herself.

Following Joanne, Gaga took a break from music to concebtrate on acting. She starred in American Horror Story: Hotel as the widowed hotelkeeper Elizabeth. But Gaga’s finest hour came in 2018 with the remake of A Star Is Born, wherein she and Bradley Cooper starred as lovers Ally and Jackson Maine, whose relationship becomes strained after her career begins to overshadow his. The role earned her a Critics Choice Award, as well as nods for an Oscar, Golden Globe and a BAFTA.

Having proven herself brilliantly, Gaga pursued more acting roles, namely as the tortured socialite Patrizia Reggiani in House Of Gucci and, most recently, the Harley Quinn ingénue in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Throughout her acting career, Gaga kept her music career alive, performing a Las Vegas residency, embarking on a couple of world tours and releasing her sixth studio album, Chromatica (2020) – which saw her achieve six consecutive number one albums in the US. Influence by 1990s house music, the LP earned a Best Pop Duo Grammy for ‘Rain On Me’ (feat. Ariana Grande).

With its gaudy electronics and vulgar lyrics, Chromatica signalled the return of the Gaga the world had fallen in love with over a decade previously. It was the mark of an artist on a constant upward trajectory. An interview with Hot Press in those early days shows Gaga fulfilling a prophecy of sorts:

HOT PRESS: Do you have a long-term plan? Are you looking a few years ahead or just riding out the moment?

LADY GAGA:  I guess the plan is that I’m just never going to stop.

So she never did.

 Go With The Chaos

In 2024, Gaga initiated a new chapter when she told Rolling Stone that she was “writing some of the best songs I can remember.” During a promotional tour for Joker: Folie à Deux, she officially announced a soon-to-be-released lead single. When ‘Disease’, the first offering from her seventh album, Mayhem, was released it became clear that we were witnessing a true return to form.

Mayhem is a captivating work, effortlessly blending refinement with taut precision, while still leaving room for Gaga’s landmark abandon. The mood swings are wilder, the logic more tangential; the songwriting might even be her best yet. Now a seasoned public figure, the album addresses what it means to be a mythologised superstar.

‘Perfect Celebrity’ is a case in point, as well as a mirror to 2009’s ‘Paparazzi’, putting the onus on Gaga as she pits her public persona against the person behind that facade: “I’m made of plastic like a human doll / You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all,” she sings. “I talk in circles because my brain, it aches / You say ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate.”

While many celebrities lament the burden of fame in ways that feel tiresome or even self-serving, Gaga takes a different approach. She seems to view fame not just as a spotlight but as a psychological leviathan, an overwhelming part of her identity that disrupts everything, from public perception to personal relationships, feeding into both self-doubt and expectations.

On Mayhem, she delves into the complex ways identity can fracture, inviting listeners into her inner world. Through this, she transforms her rarefied celebrity into something deeply relatable, offering a window into the turbulent interaction of fame and selfhood.

Bubbling beneath these existential statements of duality is a soundscape that’s equally varied. Ranging from rubbery, industrial techno to heartfelt torch songs, Mayhem makes a thesis statement of its title, where the heart is disorder. Telling Billboard about the process behind making Mayhem, she centred on a self-professed mantra: “Go with the chaos.”

The suggestion led her back to the core values of Fame: swampy synths, loud choruses, high-camp, a fashion-forward visual campaign and, in the case of ‘Abracadabra’, a hook that reworks the rah-rah-ooh-la-la of ‘Bad Romance’ with a wink and a nod. But what separates Fame from Mayhem is that one album was made by an emerging star on the hunt for glory, and the other is the work of an established megastar.

As history tells us, the “return-to-form” album often succeeds on the back of familiarity; longtime fans are always chasing the highs of the artist’s breakthrough. That approach can founder, though, if it leans too far into the past. In the last year, Justin Timberlake and Katy Perry did exactly that, using bygone tropes to forge wobbly paths forward.

Mayhem isn’t bogged down by unnecessary nostalgia; Gaga’s voice feels liberated, unburdened by the high expectations she and her audience have set for her. Fame is challenging to achieve and even harder to sustain – something Gaga knows better than anyone. As it happens, embracing the truest self – in all its chaos – is the best way forward.

Mayhem is out now.