But over the past few months, Gaga has stoked anticipation for her sixth pop LP with a wildly successful (if relatively anodyne), chart-topping Bruno Mars duet, “Die With a Smile,” and two of her hardest-hitting singles in a decade: the deliciously warped “Disease,” a churning, industrial pop dirge that highlights Nine Inch Nails as an influence on this album, and “Abracadabra,” a latex-tight dance-floor incantation with a chorus that finds her speaking in tongues like the high priestess of her own self-referential religion: “Abracadabra, amor ooh na na / Abracadabra morta ooh Gaga.” It is, of course, an expertly executed sequel to her 2009 smash “Bad Romance,” just as the following track, the skronky, gloriously hedonistic “Garden of Eden” plays out like an even more vivid return to the club she visited on her first hit, “Just Dance.”
Throughout its 14 tracks, “Mayhem” dances on the line between clever self-referentiality and less inspired rehashing. The corrosive “Perfect Celebrity” is a sonic highlight that nonetheless butts up against the album’s thematic and lyrical limitations, returning to one of her favorite, and now tired, topics: the damage inflicted by fame. Is the opening line — “I’m made of plastic like a human doll” — a winking throwback to the “Chromatica” track “Plastic Doll,” or a bit of recycled imagery?
For the first time since her semi-misunderstood 2013 bacchanal “Artpop,” Lady Gaga commits to the clenched-fist conviction and over-the-top excess that made her a star in the first place. She sounds locked in all throughout “Mayhem,” even during its most middling and questionable material, which begins around the eighth track and carries through the second half. The midtempo “LoveDrug” gets lost in lyrical clichés, while the slow-crawling electro ballad “The Beast” feels written expressly for placement in the trailer of an instantly forgettable direct-to-streaming erotic thriller (though Gaga sings the heck out of it just the same).
Still, her riskier moves usually pay off. “Killah,” an outré collaboration with the French D.J. and producer Gesaffelstein, stretches a sex-is-death metaphor to truly absurd extremes, but Gaga, vamping like an even more cartoonish version of David Bowie circa “Young Americans,” gives the song a goofy urgency that’s hard to resist.
While there’s a lot of superficial gore and carnage on “Mayhem” — and much of it is enjoyably campy, like the lite-disco “Hollaback Girl” throwback “Zombieboy” — the album’s underlying conflicts are internal. In the elaborately choreographed video for “Abracadabra,” two opposing Gagas wrestle for control; on the wrenching “How Bad Do U Want Me,” the other woman is a shadow self.