Lady Gaga has finally announced her new album. Mayhem, the 14-track album formerly alluded to as LG7, is due out March 7, via Interscope. A new song will debut on Sunday, February 2, with a music video premiering during a commercial break at the 2025 Grammy Awards.
Gaga said in a press release that the album “started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” likening the process to “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.” Lady Gaga executive-produced the album alongside Michael Polansky and Andrew Watt, with individual producers including Watt, Cirkut, and Gesaffelstein.
Speculation about the Chromatica follow-up—she jokingly calls her 2024 record Harlequin LG6.5—ramped up last September, when Gaga revealed, during promotion for Joker: Folie à Deux, that the new album would be out in February 2025. (Close enough!) She followed the news with a song and video, “Disease,” and a series of teasers, including a Times Square billboard and a countdown clock on her website that ended today with the announcement. Her 2024 Bruno Mars collaboration, “Die With a Smile,” will also feature on the new album; that song and “Disease” bookend the otherwise unannounced tracklist.
Between then and now, she has also covered “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” performed at a Kamala Harris election rally, and lined up a headline slot at this year’s Coachella. Speaking about the new album to Vogue, she said, “There’s a lot of pain associated with this adventure, and when I start to explore that pain it can bring out another side to my artistry. When I’m here at this studio, I’m relaxed and I am able to face my demons and what’s remarkable is… that’s the music. I’m able to hear it back.”
Read “Joker: Folie à Deux Review: Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix Make a Bad Movie Sparkle” and Pitchfork’s Sunday review of Artpop.
