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From the moment she blasted onto the pop scene in 2008, Lady Gaga became a lightning rod for public speculation. 
Every inch of her persona — her outfits, her lyrics, her anatomy — was scrutinized by fans, critics and media outlets alike. When new projects were announced, speculation would follow; what would Gaga do this time? When some of those projects fell commercially short of the stratospheric bar she’d set at the foundation of her career, that speculation curdled into declarations: Gaga’s reign as pop music’s paragon must be over.

Nearly two decades after that industry-reshaping debut, the pop icon is still struggling to manage the weight of those expectations. “Ever since my first album, I did listen to what people would say. ‘Will she outdo herself? Can she top herself? Can she live up to this? She needs to evolve, she hasn’t changed enough,’” Gaga tells Billboard. “There was a lot of noise.”

When it came time for her to embark on creating her seventh studio album, that noise hadn’t gone away. Fans, who had dubbed the untitled project “LG7,” were sharing wishlists of what they wanted to see Gaga do next. What genre would she tackle this time? Would there be high-profile features? Could the long-awaited continuation of “Telephone” finally materialize?

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Sitting in a New York hotel’s conference room, Gaga’s shoulders relax. “Taking the pressure off myself helped me to value what I feel really matters about me as a person,” she says, her face softening. “When you put your artistry first, and then you take the other stuff away … it gave me so much dignity. And I didn’t realize how much I was craving that.”

Mayhem, Gaga’s long-awaited new album (out Friday, March 7 via Interscope Records), doesn’t concern itself with expectations. It does play with them, though, changing up the sonic and thematic spaces it occupies before it can be boiled down into a single idea. In a musical landscape concerned with “album eras,” Mayhem refuses to be easily categorized. Ranging from grinding industrial techno one moment to soulful, heartfelt balladry the next, Mayhem makes its title a thesis statement — the throughline is disorder. 

That pandemonium was established early in the process of making the album, thanks to Gaga’s own sense of experimentation in the studio. When setting out to write and record her new project, the singer says she found herself taking a piecemeal approach to her creative process, a welcome change from past efforts. 

“There have been times in my career where I had an idea in terms of how to conceptually approach a record. But I would say that this album, from start to finish, was like pieces coming together,” she says. “I did not want to turn it into anything artificial, I really wanted to allow myself to just follow the music. By doing that, it started to slowly remind me of my earlier work.”

As she began piecing her music together, Gaga created a mantra for her work on the album: “Go with the chaos.” Instead of laboring under the expectation of finding a sonic or thematic subject, she instead opted to embrace the tumult itself and see where it took her. 

Part of that process involved bringing in a new suite of collaborators — working closely with co-executive producer Andrew Watt and collaborators like Cirkut and Gesaffelstein, Gaga went about crafting an album that sounded like her while still bringing something fresh to the mix. As Cirkut explained to Billboard in November 2024, that wasn’t always easy to balance in the studio. “Do you do something so different that you move away from the things that you are known for?” he asked. “But if you just do the same thing that you’ve been known for, does that end up feeling like a ‘more-of-the-same’ type situation?”

Gaga says that she found herself leaning hard into her own intuition during the recording process. “I think what I look for in collaborators are people that will uphold me as a woman in the studio and follow my vision,” she explains. “I tried musically to work with people that I could push myself with — so that it wouldn’t be exactly what you’ve heard from me before, but there is the DNA of my approach to pop music.”

That approach to her pop sound pays off in spades throughout Mayhem. On early highlight “Perfect Celebrity,” Gaga takes the ruminations on fame that she made a career out of and twists the knife that little bit deeper. Serving as a kind of mirror image to 2009’s “Paparazzi,” “Perfect Celebrity” puts much of the onus back on Gaga as she examines why she fought for fame so vigorously. “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.”

“I had this feeling inside myself of, ‘You can’t write about that. You can’t show this part of yourself.’ And then I was like, ‘No … embrace it, what do you want to say?’” Gaga recalls of the writing process. “It became complicated so quickly; owning that I wanted to be a star, and that it did bring a lot of complication to my life. So then, it’s also that anger that I felt towards myself, that I brought this on myself.”

She takes a beat before continuing. “I was nervous to put it on the album. But part of Mayhem is that I just put it all out there,” she says.

That’s not to say all of Mayhem is shrouded in darkness — later tracks on the album, like the campy disco banger “Zombieboy,” show Gaga shrugging off that self-seriousness to embrace pure pop hedonism. “Part of my personal mayhem is that it’s fun, and that’s why I keep doing it,” she says. “That’s what makes it complicated — it is dark, and it pulls me away from myself, but it’s also the best time. It’s that point where you’re at the party, and you’re totally numbing out, and you’ve fully accepted that by the morning you are not going to feel well, but you’re fully in it.”

As experimental and twisted as Mayhem gets, it’s clear that the early teases of the album have struck a chord with global audiences. “Die With a Smile,” the project’s closing track featuring Bruno Mars, spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — that’s the second longest stay any of the star’s singles have held in the chart’s top slot, just one week behind her 2011 behemoth “Born This Way.” Meanwhile, “Abracadabra” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart — where it remained for three weeks, — and continues to float around the Hot 100’s top 40. 

Gaga is still in awe at both tracks’ immediate success. “I am really grateful, and I am really beside myself,” she says. “I never expect anything like this, because you never know, all you can do is your best. This is really a true honor and privilege.”

Along with becoming one of the biggest hits of her career, “Die With a Smile” also earned Gaga her 14th Grammy — she took home the 2025 trophy for best pop duo/group performance alongside Mars. When she took to the stage at the February ceremony, though, Gaga made sure that she shared her win with the trans community, reminding the audience at home that “trans people are not invisible” and that they “deserve love.”

Looking at the current administration’s ongoing attacks against the trans community, Gaga doesn’t mince her words. “I think it is abysmal, and horrible, and violent and wrong,” she offers, matter-of-factly. “I just want to extend all of my love and gratitude to the trans community for showing us so much strength and love.” 

She often shares that same sentiment about her fanbase, the Little Monsters, whom Gaga credits with “having this conversation [with me] through art and fashion and politics for a long time.” While her fans have always been active and outspoken in their support for her, Mother Monster has noticed a shift in her following as of late. 

“I’ve seen Little Monsters be so amazing for almost 20 years. I haven’t seen us like this in a long time,” she says, pointing to the swath of videos fans have shared across apps like TikTok and Instagram learning her choreography and creating new art out of her music. “Between the dancing, the makeup. the hair, the costumes, it gives me so much life, and I am really honored. All I ever want to do is make something that you press play and you feel good for the duration of the record, and maybe you play it again.”

That activation on her base’s part may have something to do with a similar activation on the singer’s part — fans on TikTok have noticed how frequently Gaga comments on fan-made videos, with some even referring to the phenomenon as “conjuring” Gaga.

“That is me,” Gaga confirms about her TikTok comments, smiling. “That’s the way we always were — it just wasn’t to this extent, because we didn’t have the same tools to talk to each other.” After a pause, a look of incredulity crosses Gaga’s face. “I just … how could I not? I always say that I have the best seat in the house, because I get to watch the fans.”

With her fans fired up for a new album, her singles finding massive global success and her meticulously-crafted album ready to release, Gaga takes one last look at a career’s worth of expectations before dismissing them. “I do think that I felt a lot of pressure, over the years, to prove myself as a musician,” she says. “And that sometimes stopped me from having fun. So, I tried to have a lot of fun making this record.”