Lady Gaga officially announces new album Mayhem

Mayhem? “Disease”? These sound like buzzwords in a cable news broadcast you’d immediately switch off for your own peace of mind. But they are also the title of Lady Gaga’s upcoming album and its lead single, respectively. Gaga’s last full-length record of original tunes, Chromatica, debuted at the height of the global pandemic in 2020. Her new album Mayhem will be released just in time for the five-year anniversary of COVID on March 7. What dark portals might Gaga open this time around?

Jokes aside, Mayhem isn’t a QAnon conspiracy, it’s a “triumphant return to Gaga’s pop roots,” according to a press release. “The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” the singer said in a statement, describing the creative process as “reassembling a shattered mirror: even if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something beautiful and whole in its own new way.”

Mayhem was executive produced by Gaga, Andrew Watt (who has worked with Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and Post Malone, among others), and Gaga’s fiancé Michael Polansky. Producers include Gaga, Watt, Cirkut, and Gesaffelstein. The third single—following “Disease” and the hit Bruno Mars collab “Die With A Smile“—will debut with a new video during a commercial break for the Grammy Awards on February 2. The full tracklist, with 14 songs total, will be released at a later date. 

Ahead of all the Mayhem, Gaga is among the superstars scheduled to perform at the FireAid benefit concert for victims of the L.A. wildfires. (Another chilling bit of deja vu: Gaga helped organize the “Together At Home” COVID relief benefit special ahead of the release of Chromatica. History sure does like to rhyme.) The new album, which the press release says “explores themes of chaos and transformation,” is ultimately about love, Gaga told The Los Angeles Times last month. “That’s the answer to all the chaos in my life is that I find peace with love,” she explained. “Every song that I wrote, I just kept getting kind of swept away in these different dreams I was having about the past—almost like a recollection of all these bad decisions that I made in my life. But it ends in this very happy place.”