Yahoo Lifestyle Lady Gaga Announces First Solo Album In 5 Years: 'A Labour Of Total Love'
Lady Gaga has finally announced her long-anticipated seventh studio album: “Mayhem.”
After dropping various teasers on her website, the pop star on Monday confirmed the news in an Instagram video, which features photos of Gaga and a rising hum that culminates in a title card.
“Mayhem” is scheduled to hit stores March 7.
“The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” Gaga told multiple media outlets in a statement Monday, describing the creative process for “Mayhem” 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,” Gaga said ― an idea reminiscent of the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken glass or pottery is reassembled in a way that highlights the fractures rather than trying to disguise them.
“Mayhem” will reportedly feature 14 tracks, including “Disease” and “Die With a Smile” ― two previously released hits with Bruno Mars, the latter of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this month. Fans of the chameleonic singer are already clamoring for the other songs.
“WHERE’S THE TRACKLIST,” wrote one fan on X, formerly Twitter, prompting another to post a screenshot from Gaga’s Instagram video where titles like “Lovedrug,” “Blade of Grass” and “Zombieboy” can be seen.
Gaga has spent the past five years on wildly disparate creative pursuits, including a jazz record with the late Tony Bennett, a companion album to the “Joker” sequel she starred in last year, and a “Chromatica Ball Tour” documentary.
“Mayhem is about following your own chaos into whatever cranny of your life that it takes you to,” Gaga told Elle UK in an interview published Tuesday. “And in that way, it was about following the songs. Writing as many songs as I did for this album was a labour of total love.”
“And then you just have to be very cutthroat by the end,” she added, referring to the process of whittling down the final tracklist.
Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, said the album’s influences include “90s alternative, electro-grunge, Prince and [David] Bowie melodies, guitar and attitude, funky bass lines, French electronic dance, and analog synths.”
She also told Elle UK that making “Mayhem” involved mining her own anxiety by “playing with transgressive and challenging themes” that she “couldn’t do... for a really long time” — only to discover during production that this is now “just what I naturally want” to explore.
Fortunately for her endearingly nicknamed “Little Monsters” fanbase, Gaga is set to debut her third single from “Mayhem” alongside a music video during a commercial break at the 2025 Grammy Awards on Sunday. The full tracklist, meanwhile, will be officially released at a later date.
